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PROSE-POEMS 



AND 



SELECTIONS 



FROM THE 



WRITINGS AND SAYINOS 



OF 



Robert G. Ingersoll 



NINTH EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED 



NEW YORK 

C. P. FARRELL 

1910 



•A) 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1884, by C. P. Farrbll, 
in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
Copyrighted November, 1910 



THE TUDOR PRESS 

NEW YORK 



£-C!.A2?8480 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. 



HE publisher alone is responsible for the 
selection of the material in this volume. 
It has required no special skill to 
include the well-known orations and 
tributes which have become classic ; but 
the real difficulty, where there is so much 
to choose from, has been to exclude. 

For the present, the publisher contents himself 
with this collection, which he hopes will be welcomed 
by the real friends of intellectual freedom. 

C. P. Farrell. 

Washington, D. C, March f, 1884. 




PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 




HE generous and very gratifying reception 
of " Prose-Poems," and the continued 
demand, have led to this new issue. 
The former edition has been revised, 
and at the request of many friends of 
the author enlarged, so as to contain 

much additional material and some of Mr. Ingersoll's 

latest utterances. 

C. P. Farrell. 



New York> January, 188,6. 



CONTENTS. 



Oration delivered on 




God Silent, . 


90 


Decoration-Day, 1882, 
before the grand army 
of the Republic, at the 
Academy of Music, N. Y., 
A Tribute to Ebon C. In- 
gersoll, 


7 
25 


Alcohol, 
auguste comte, 
The Infidel, 
Napoleon, 
The Republic, 


91 
93 
95 
97 
100 


J A Vision of War, . 


3 1 


Dawn of the New Day, 


101 


At a Child's Grave, 


37 


Reformers, 


103 


Benefits for Injuries, 


42 


The Garden of Eden, . 


106 


^ We Build, .... 


43 


Thomas Paine, 


107 


A Tribute to the Rev. 




The Age of Faith, . 


117 


Alexander Clark, 


45 


Origin of Religion, 


119 


The Grant Banquet, . 


49 


The Unpardonable Sin, . 


122 


Apostrophe to Liberty, 


57 


The Olive Branch, 


123 


A Tribute to John G. Mills, 


59- 


Free Will, . . 


125 


The Warp and Woof, 


63 


The King of Death, 


130 


The Cemetery, 


65 


The Wise Man, 


131 


Originality, 


69 


Bruno, .... 


133 


Then and Now, 


7i 


The Real Bible, . 


139 


Voltaire, .... 


75 


Benedict Spinoza, 


141 


Lazarus, 


84 


The First Doubt, 


145 


What is Worship ? . 


85 


The Infinite Horror, . 


147 


\ Humboldt, 


87 


Nature, . 


153 



Night and Morning, . 157 
The Conflict, . . .161 
Death of the Aged, . 164 
The Charity of Extrav- 
agance, ... 165 
Woman, .... 169 
The Sacred Myths, . 175 
Inspiration, . . . 177 
Religious Liberty of the 

Bible, .... 181 

The Laugh of a Child, 184 

The Christian Night, . 185 

My Choice, ... 188 

Why? .... 189 

Imagination, . . 192 
Science, . . . .193 

If Death Ends All, . 195 

Here and There, . . 197 

How Long? . . . 199 

Liberty, .... 201 

Jehovah and Brahma, . 203 

The Free Soul, . . 205 

My Position, . . • 207 

Good and Bad, . . . 209 

The Miraculous Book, 211 

Orthodox Dotage, . . 213 

The Abolitionists, . 215 

Providence, . . . 217 

The Man Christ, . . 219 

The Divine Salutation, 221 
At the Grave of Benj. 

W. Parker, . . .222 

Fashion and Beauty, . 223 

Apostrophe to Science, 225 

Elizur Wright, . . 227 

The Imagination, . . 234 



No Respecter of Persons, 238 



Abraham Lincoln, 


239 


The Meaning of Law, 


248 


What is Blasphemy ? . 


249 


Some Reasons, . 


250 


Selections, 


251 


Love 


284 


Origin and Destiny, 


285 


Life, .... 


287 


The Birthplace of Burns, 


290 


Tribute to Henry Ward 




Beecher, 


291 


Mrs. Ida Whiting Knowles 


,301 


Art and Morality, 


303 


Tribute to Roscoe Conkling 319 


Tribute to Courtlandt 




Palmer, 


337 


Tribute to Richard H. 




Whiting, 


345 


The Brain, 


348 


The Sacred Leaves, 


349 


Mrs. Mary H. Fiske, 


35i 


Horace Seaver, 


355 


What is Poetry ? 


367 


The Music of Wagner, 


375 


Leaves of Grass, 


38i 


Vivisection, 


384 


Republic of Mediocrity, 


387 


Tribute to Walt Whitman, 


393 


Speech Nominating James 




G. Blaine, . 


4QJ 


The Jews, 


406 


Tribute to Anton Seidl, 


411 


Tribute to Isaac H. Bailey 


► 4H 


Declaration of the Free, 


422 



ORATION. 



DELIVERED ON DECORATION-DAY, 1882, BEFORE THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC* 
AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC, NEW YORK. 



ORATION. 




Delivered on Decoration- Day, 1882, before the Grand Army of the Republic, 
at the Academy of Music, New York. 



HIS day is sacred to our heroes dead. 
Upon their tombs we have lovingly 
laid the wealth of Spring. 

This is a day for memory and tears. 
A mighty Nation bends above its hon- 
ored graves, and pays to noble dust 
the tribute of its love. 

Gratitude is the fairest flower that sheds its per- 
fume in the heart. 

To-day we tell the history of our country's life 
— recount the lofty deeds of vanished years — the 
toil and suffering, the defeats and victories of heroic 
men, — of men who made our Nation great and free. 
We see the first ships whose prows were gilded 
by the western sun. We feel the thrill of discovery 
when the New World was found. We see the 



IO ORATION. 

oppressed, the serf, the peasant and the slave, men 
whose flesh had known the chill of chains — the ad- 
venturous, the proud, the brave, sailing an unknown 
sea, seeking homes in unknown lands. We see the 
settlements, the little clearings, the block-house and 
the fort, the rude and lonely huts. Brave men, true 
women, builders of homes, fellers of forests, founders 
of States ! 

Separated from the Old World, — away from the 
heartless distinctions of caste, — away from sceptres 
and titles and crowns, they governed themselves. 
They defended their homes; they earned their bread. 
Each citizen had a voice, and the little villages 
became republics. Slowly the savage was driven 
back. The days and nights were filled with fear, 
and the slow years with massacre and war, and 
cabins' earthen floors were wet with blood of mothers 
and their babes. 

But the savages of the New World were kinder 
than the kings and nobles of the Old ; and so the 
human tide kept coming, and the places of the dead 
were filled. Amid common dangers and common 
hopes, the prejudices and feuds of Europe faded 
slowly from their hearts. From every land, of every 



ORATION. 1 1 

speech, driven by want and lured by hope, exiles and 
emigrants sought the mysterious Continent of the 
West. 

Year after year the colonists fought and toiled and 
suffered and increased. They began to talk about 
liberty — to reason of the rights of man. They asked 
no help from distant kings, and they began to doubt 
the use of paying tribute to the useless. They lost 
respect for dukes and lords, and held in high esteem 
all honest men. There was the dawn of a new day. 
They began to dream of independence. They found 
that they could make and execute the laws. They 
had tried the experiment of self-government. They 
had succeeded. The Old World wished to dominate 
the New. In the care and keeping of the colonists 
was the destiny of this Continent — of half the world. 

On this day the story of the great struggle 
between colonists and kings should be told. We 
should tell our children of the contest — first for 
justice, then for freedom. We should tell them the 
history of the Declaration of Independence — the 
chart and compass of all human rights: — All men 
are equal, and have the right to life, to liberty 
and joy. 



12 ORATION. 

This Declaration uncrowned kings and wrested 
from the hands of titled tyranny the sceptre of usurped 
and arbitrary power. It superseded royal grants, and 
repealed the cruel statutes of a thousand years. It 
gave the peasant a career ; it knighted all the sons of 
toil ; it opened all the paths to fame, and put the 
star of hope above the cradle of the poor man's 
babe. 

England was then the mightiest of nations — 
mistress of every sea — and yet our fathers, poor 
and few, defied her power. 

To-day we remember the defeats, the victories, 
the disasters, the weary marches, the poverty, the 
hunger, the sufferings, the agonies, and above all, the 
glories, of the Revolution. We remember all — from 
Lexington to Valley Forge, and from that midnight 
of despair to Yorktown's cloudless day. We re- 
member the soldiers and thinkers — the heroes of the 
sword and pen. They had the brain and heart, the 
wisdom and the courage, to utter and defend these 
words : " Governments derive their just powers from 
the consent of the governed." In defence of this 
sublime and self-evident truth the war was waged 
and won. 



ORATION. 13 

To-day we remember all the heroes, all the gener- 
ous and chivalric men who came from other lands to 
make ours free. Of the many thousands who shared 
the gloom and glory of the seven sacred years, not 
one remains. The last has mingled with the earth, 
and nearly all are sleeping now in unmarked graves, 
and some beneath the leaning, crumbling stones from 
which their names have been effaced by Time's irrev- 
erent and relentless hands. But the Nation they 
founded remains. The United States are still free 
and independent. The " government derives its 
just powers from the consent of the governed," and 
fifty millions of free people remember with grati- 
tude the heroes of the Revolution. 

Let us be truthful ; let us be kind. When peace 
came, when the independence of a new Nation was 
acknowledged, the great truth for which our fathers 
fought was half denied, and the Constitution was in- 
consistent with the Declaration. The war was waged 
for liberty, and yet the victors forged new fetters for 
their fellow men. The chains our fathers broke were 
put by them upon the limbs of others. " Freedom for 
All " was the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by 
night, through seven years of want and war. In 



14 ORATION. 

peace, the cloud was forgotten and the pillar blazed 
unseen. 

Let us be truthful : all our fathers were not true 
to themselves. In war they had been generous, noble 
and self-sacrificing ; with peace came selfishness and 
greed. They were not great enough to appreciate the 
grandeur of the principles for w r hich they fought. 
They ceased to regard the great truths as having 
universal application. " Liberty for All " included 
only themselves. They qualified the Declaration. 
They interpolated the word " white." They obliterated 
the word "All." 

Let us be kind. We will remember the age in 
which they lived. We will compare them with the 
citizens of other nations. They made merchandise 
of men. They legalized a crime. They sowed the 
seeds of war. But they founded this Nation. 

Let us gratefully remember. 

Let us gratefully forget. 

To-day we remember the heroes of the second 
war with England, in which our fathers fought for 
the freedom of the seas — for the rights of the Ameri- 
can sailor. We remember with pride the splendid 



ORATION. 15 

victories of Erie and Champlain and the wondrous 
achievements upon the sea — achievements that covered 
our navy with a glory that neither the victories nor 
defeats of the future can dim. We remember the 
heroic services and sufferings of those who fought 
the merciless savage of the frontier. We see the 
midnight massacre, and hear the war-cries of the allies 
of England. We see the flames climb round the 
happy homes, and in the charred and blackened 
ruins the mutilated bodies of wives and children. 
Peace came at last, crowned with the victory of New 
Orleans — a victory that "did redeem all sorrows' 9 
and all defeats. 

The Revolution gave our fathers a free land, — 
the War of 18 12 a free sea. 

To-day we remember the gallant men who bore 
our flag in triumph from the Rio Grande to the 
heights of Chapultepec. Leaving out of question 
the justice of our cause — the necessity for war — 
we are yet compelled to applaud the marvelous 
courage of our troops. A handful of men, brave, 
impetuous, determined, irresistible, conquered a na- 
tion. Our history has no record of more daring 
deeds. 



l6 ORATION. 

Again peace came, and the Nation hoped and 
thought that strife was at an end. We had grown 
too powerful to be attacked. Our resources were 
boundless, and the future seemed secure. The hardy 
pioneers moved to the great West. Beneath their 
ringing strokes the forests disappeared, and on the 
prairies waved the billowed seas of wheat and corn. 
The great plains were crossed, the mountains were 
conquered, and the foot of victorious adventure 
pressed the shore of the Pacific. In the great North 
all the streams went singing to the sea, turning 
wheels and spindles, and casting shuttles back and 
forth. Inventions were springing like magic from 
a thousand brains. From Labors holy altars rose 
and leaped the smoke and flame, and from the count- 
less forges rang the chant of rhythmic stroke. 

But in the South, the negro toiled unpaid, and 
mothers wept while babes were sold, and at the auction 
block husbands and wives speechlessly looked the 
last good-bye. Fugitives, lighted by the Northern 
Star, sought liberty on English soil, and were, by 
Northern men, thrust back to whip and chain. The 
great statesmen, the successful politicians, announced 
that law had compromised with crime, that justice had 



ORATION. 17 

been bribed, and that time had barred appeal. A race 
was left without a right, without a hope. The future 
had no dawn, no star — nothing but ignorance and fear, 
nothing but work and want. This was the conclusion 
of the statesmen, the philosophy of the politicians — 
of constitutional expounders: — this was decided by 
courts and ratified by the Nation. 

We had been successful in three wars. We 
had wrested thirteen colonies from Great Britain. 
We had conquered our place upon the high seas. We 
had added more than two millions of square miles to 
the national domain. We had increased in population 
from three to thirty-one millions. We were in the 
midst of plenty. We were rich and free. Ours 
appeared to be the most prosperous of Nations. But 
it was only appearance. The statesmen and the poli- 
ticians were deceived. Real victories can be won only 
for the Right. The triumph of Justice is the only 
Peace. Such is the nature of things. He who en- 
slaves another cannot be free. He who attacks the 
right, assaults himself. The mistake our fathers made 
had not been corrected. The foundations of the 
Republic were insecure. The great dome of the temple 



1 8 ORATION. 

was clad in the light of prosperity, but the corner- 
stones were crumbling. Four millions of human 
beings were enslaved. Party cries had been mistaken 
for principles — partisanship for patriotism — success 
for justice. 

But Pity pointed to the scarred and bleeding 
backs of slaves ; Mercy heard the sobs of mothers 
reft of babes, and Justice held aloft the scales, in 
which one drop of blood shed by a master's lash, out- 
weighed a Nation's gold. There were a few men, 
a few women, who had the courage to attack this 
monstrous crime. They found it entrenched in consti- 
tutions, statutes, and decisions, — barricaded and bas- 
tioned by every department and by every party. 
Politicians were its servants, statesmen its attorneys, 
judges its menials, presidents its puppets, and upon 
its cruel altar had been sacrificed our country's honor. 
It was the crime of the Nation — of the whole country 
— North and South responsible alike. 

To-day we reverently thank the abolitionists. 
Earth has no grander men — no nobler women. They 
were the real philanthropists, the true patriots. 

When the will defies fear, when the heart ap- 
plauds the brain, when duty throws the gauntlet 



ORATION. 19 

down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise 
with death — this is heroism. The abolitionists were 
heroes. He loves his country best who strives to 
make it best. The bravest men are those who have 
the greatest fear of doing wrong. Mere politicians 
wish the country to do something for them. True 
patriots desire to do something for their country. 
Courage without conscience is a wild beast. Patri- 
otism without principle is the prejudice of birth, the 
animal attachment to place. These men, these women, 
had courage and conscience, patriotism and principle, 
heart and brain. 

The South relied upon the bond, — upon a bar- 
barous clause that stained, disfigured and defiled the 
federal pact, and made the monstrous claim that 
slavery was the Nation's ward. The spot of shame 
grew red in Northern cheeks, and Northern men 
declared that slavery had poisoned, cursed and blighted 
soul and soil enough, and that the Territories must 
be free. The radicals of the South cried : " No 
Union without Slavery!" The radicals of the 
North replied : " No Union without Liberty!" The 
Northern radicals were right. Upon the great issue 
of free homes for free men. a President was elected 



20 ORATION. 

by the Free States. The South appealed to the 
sword, and raised the standard of revolt. For the 
first time in history the oppressors rebelled. 

But let us to-day be great enough to forget 
individuals, — great enough to know that slavery was 
treason, that slavery was rebellion, that slavery fired 
upon our flag and sought to wreck and strand the 
mighty ship that bears the hope and fortune of this 
world. The first shot liberated the North. Constitu- 
tion, statutes and decisions, — compromises, platforms 
and resolutions made, passed, and ratified in the 
interest of slavery became mere legal lies, base and 
baseless. Parchment and paper could no longer stop 
or stay the onward march of man. The North was 
free. Millions instantly resolved that the Nation 
should not die — that Freedom should not perish, and 
that Slavery should not live. 

Millions of our brothers, our sons, our fathers, our 
husbands, answered to the Nation's call. 

The great armies have desolated the earth. The 
greatest soldiers have been ambition's dupes. They 
waged war for the sake of place and pillage, pomp 
and power, — for the ignorant applause of vulgar 
millions, — for the flattery of parasites, and the adula- 



ORATION. 21 

tion of sycophants and slaves. Let us proudly re- 
member that in our time the greatest, the grandest, 
the noblest army of the world fought, not to enslave, 
but to free ; not to destroy, but to save ; not for con- 
quest, but for conscience ; not only for us, but for 
every land and every race. 

With courage, with enthusiasm, with a devotion 
never excelled, with an exaltation and purity of purpose 
never equalled, this grand army fought the battles of 
the Republic. For the preservation of this Nation, for 
the destruction of slavery, these soldiers, these sailors, 
on land and on sea, disheartened by no defeat, dis- 
couraged by no obstacle, appalled by no danger, neither 
paused nor swerved until a stainless flag, without a 
rival, floated over all our wide domain, and until every 
human being beneath its folds was absolutely free. 

The great victory for human rights — the greatest 
of all the years — had been won ; won by the Union 
men of the North, by the Union men of the South, 
and by those who had been slaves. Liberty was 
national, Slavery was dead. 

The flag for which the heroes fought, for which 
they died, is the symbol of all we are, of all we 
hope to be. 



22 ORATION. 

It is the emblem of equal rights. 

It means free hands, free lips, self-government and 
the sovereignty of the individual. 

It means that this continent has been dedicated 
to freedom. 

It means universal education, — light for every 
mind, knowledge for every child. 

It means that the school-house is the fortress 
of Liberty. 

It means that " Governments derive their just 
powers from the consent of the governed;" that each 
man is accountable to and for the Government ; that 
responsibility goes hand-in-hand with liberty. 

It means that it is the duty of every citizen to bear 
his share of the public burden, — to take part in the 
affairs of his town, his county, his State and his 
Country. 

It means that the ballot-box is the ark of the 
covenant ; that the source of authority must not be 
poisoned. 

It means the perpetual right of peaceful revolution. 

It means that every citizen of the Republic — native 
or naturalized — must be protected ; at home, in every 
State, — abroad, in every land, on every sea. 



ORATION. 23 

It means that all distinctions based on birth or 
blood, have perished from our laws ; that our Govern- 
ment shall stand between labor and capital, between 
the weak and the strong, between the individual and 
the corporation, between want and wealth, and give 
and guarantee simple justice to each and all. 

It means that there shall be a legal remedy for 
every wrong. 

It means National hospitality, — that we must 
welcome to our shores the exiles of the world, and 
that we may not drive them back. Some may be 
deformed by labor, dwarfed by hunger, broken in 
spirit, victims of tyranny and caste, — in whose sad 
faces may be read the touching record of a weary 
life ; and yet their children, born of liberty and love, 
will be symmetrical and fair, intelligent and free- 
That flag is the emblem of a supreme will, — of 
a Nation's power. Beneath its folds the weakest 
must be protected and the strongest must obey. It 
shields and canopies alike the loftiest mansion and the 
rudest hut. That flag was given to the air in the 
Revolution's darkest days. It represents the sufferings 
of the past, the glories yet to be ; and like the bow of 
heaven, it is the child of storm and sun. 



24 ORATION. 

This day is sacred to the great heroic host who 
kept this flag above our heads, — sacred to the living 
and the dead — sacred to the scarred and maimed, — 
sacred to the wives who gave their husbands, to the 
mothers who gave their sons. 

Here in this peaceful land of ours, — here where the 
sun shines, where flowers grow, where children play, 
millions of armed men battled for the right and 
breasted on a thousand fields the iron storms of war. 

These brave, these incomparable men, founded 
the first Republic. They fulfilled the prophecies; 
they brought to pass the dreams ; they realized the 
hopes, that all the great and good and wise and just 
have made and had since man was man. 

But what of those who fell ? There is no language 
to express the debt we owe, the love we bear, to all the 
dead who died for us. Words are but barren sounds. 
We can but stand beside their graves and in the 
hush and silence feel what speech has never told. 

They fought, they died ; and for the first time 
since man has kept a record of events, the heavens 
bent above and domed a land without a serf, a ser- 
vant, or a slave. 



Dec. 12, 1831. May 31, 1879. 

a Tribute 



TO 



EBON C. INGERSOLL, 



BY HIS BROTHER ROBERT. 



Dec. 12, 1831. May 31, 1879. 

A TRIBUTE TO EBON C. INGERSOLL, 

BY HIS BROTHER ROBERT. 




EAR FRIENDS: I am going to do 
that which the dead oft promised he 
would do for me. 

The loved and loving brother, hus- 
band, father, friend, died where man- 
hood's morning almost touches noon, 
and while the shadows still were falling toward the 
west. 

He had not passed on life's highway the stone 
that marks the highest point ; but being weary for 
a moment, he lay down by the wayside, and using 
his burden for a pillow, fell into that dreamless sleep 
that kisses down his eyelids still. While yet in love 
with life and raptured with the world, he passed to 
silence and pathetic dust. 



28 A TRIBUTE. 

Yet, after all, it may be best, just in the happiest, 
sunniest hour of all the voyage, while eager winds 
are kissing every sail, to dash against the unseen 
rock, and in an instant hear the billows roar above 
a sunken ship. For whether in mid sea or 'mong the 
breakers of the farther shore, a wreck at last must 
mark the end of each and all. And every life, no 
matter if its every hour is rich with love and every 
moment jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become 
a tragedy as sad and deep and dark as can be woven 
of the warp and woof of mystery and death. 

This brave and tender man in every storm of life 
was oak and rock ; but in the sunshine he was vine 
and flower. He was the friend of all heroic souls. 
He climbed the heights, and left all superstitions far 
below, while on his forehead fell the golden dawning 
of the grander day. 

He loved the beautiful, and was with color, form, 
and music touched to tears. He sided with the 
weak, the poor, and wronged, and lovingly gave 
alms. With loyal heart and with the purest hands 
he faithfully discharged all public trusts. 

He was a worshipper of liberty, a friend of the 
oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote 



A TRIBUTE. 29 

these words : " For ^Justice all place a temple, and all 
season, summer." He believed that happiness is 
the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only 
worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only 
priest. He added to the sum of human joy; and 
were every one to whom he did some loving service 
to bring a blossom to his grave, he would sleep to- 
night beneath a wilderness of flowers. 

Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren 
peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look 
beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only 
answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the 
voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no 
word ; but in the night of death hope sees a star and 
listening love can hear the rustle of a wing. 

He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the 
approach of death for the return of health, whispered 
with his latest breath, "I am better now." Let us 
believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and 
tears, that these dear words are true of all the count- 
less dead. 

The record of a generous life runs like a vine 
around the memory of our dead, and every sweet, 
unselfish act is now a perfumed flower. 



30 A TRIBUTE. 

And now, to you, who have been chosen, from 
among the many men he loved, to do the last sad 
office for the dead, we give his sacred dust 

Speech cannot contain our love. There was, there 
is, no gentler, stronger, manlier man. 



A VISION OF WAR, 



EXTRACT FROM A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE SOLDIERS' RE-UNION 
AT INDIANAPOLIS, SEPTEMBER 21, 1876. 



A VISION OF WAR. 

Extracl from a speech delivered at the Soldiers' Re-union at Indianapolis, 

Sept. 21 ; 1876. 

HE past rises before me like a dream. 
Again we are in the great struggle for 
national life. We hear the sounds of 
preparation — the music of boisterous 
drums — the silver voices of heroic 
bugles. We see thousands of assem- 
blages, and hear the appeals of orators. We see 
the pale cheeks of women, and the flushed faces 
of men ; and in those assemblages we see all the 
dead whose dust we have covered with flowers. 
We lose sight of them no more. We are with 
them when they enlist in the great army of free- 
dom. We see them part with those they love. 
Some are walking for the last time in quiet, woody 
places, with the maidens they adore. We hear the 
whisperings and the sweet vows of eternal love as 




34 A VISION OF WAR 

they lingeringly part forever. Others are bending 
over cradles, kissing babes that are asleep. Some are 
receiving the blessings of old men. Some are parting 
with mothers who hold them and press them to their 
hearts again and again, and say nothing. Kisses and 
tears, tears and kisses — divine mingling of agony and 
love ! And some are talking with wives, and endeavor- 
ing with brave words, spoken in the old tones, to drive 
from their hearts the awful fear. We see them part. 
We see the wife standing in the door with the babe 
in her arms — standing in the sunlight sobbing. At the 
turn of the road a hand waves — she answers by hold- 
ing high in her loving arms the child. He is gone, 
and forever. 

We see them all as they march proudly away 
under the flaunting flags, keeping time to the grand, 
wild music of war — marching down the streets of the 
great cities — through the towns and across the 
prairies — down to the fields of glory, to do and to die 
for the eternal right. 

We go with them, one and all. We are by their 
side on all the gory fields — in all the hospitals of pain 
■ — on all the weary marches. We stand guard with 
them in the wild storm and under the quiet stars. 



A VISION OF WAR. 35 

We are with them in ravines running with blood — in 
the furrows of old fields. We are with them between 
contending hosts, unable to move, wild with thirst, 
the life ebbing slowly away among the withered 
leaves. We see them pierced by balls and torn with 
shells, in the trenches, by forts, and in the whirlwind 
of the charge, where men become iron, with nerves 
of steel. 

We are with them in the prisons of hatred and 
famine ; but human speech can never tell what they 
endured. 

We are at home when the news comes that 
they are dead. We see the maiden in the shadow 
of her first sorrow. We see the silvered head of 
the old man bowed with the last grief. 

The past rises before us, and we see four 
millions of human beings governed by the lash — 
we see them bound hand and foot — we hear the 
strokes of cruel whips — we see the hounds tracking 
women through tangled swamps. We see babes 
sold from the breasts of mothers. Cruelty un- 
speakable ! Outrage infinite ! 

Four million bodies in chains — four million souls 
in fetters. All the sacred relations of wife, mother, 



36 A VISION OF WAR. 

father and child trampled beneath the brutal feet 
of might. And all this was done under our own 
beautiful banner of the free. 

The past rises before us. We hear the roar and 
shriek of the bursting shell. The broken fetters fall. 
These heroes died. We look. Instead of slaves we see 
men and women and children. The wand of progress 
touches the auction-block, the slave-pen, the whipping- 
post, and we see homes and firesides and school- 
houses and books, and where all was want and crime 
and cruelty and fear, we see the faces of the free. 

These heroes are dead. They died for liberty — 
they died for us. They are at rest. They sleep 
in the land they made free, under the flag they 
rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad 
hemlocks, the tearful willows, and the embracing 
vines. They sleep beneath the shadows of the 
clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in 
the windowless palace of Rest. Earth may run red 
with other wars — they are at peace. In the midst 
of battle, in the roar of conflict, they found the 
serenity of death. I have one sentiment for soldiers 
living and dead : Cheers for the living ; tears for 
the dead. 



AT A CHILD'S GRAVE. 



AT A CHILD'S GRAVE. 




FRIENDS : I know how vain it is 
to gild a grief with words, and yet I 
wish to take from every grave its fear. 
Here in this world, where life and 
death are equal kings, all should be 
brave enough to meet what all the 
dead have met. The future has been filled with fear, 
stained and polluted by the heartless past. From 
the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall 
with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, 
patriarchs and babes sleep side by side. 

Why should we fear that which will come to all 
that is ? We cannot tell, we do not know, which is 
the greater blessing — -life or death. We cannot 
say that death is not a good. We do not know 
whether the grave is the end of this life, or the 
door of another, or whether the night here is not 
somewhere else a dawn. Neither can we tell 



40 AT A CHILD'S GRAVE. 

which is the more fortunate — the child dying in 
its mother's arms, before its lips have learned to 
form a word, or he who journeys all the length of 
life's uneven road, painfully taking the last slow 
steps with staff and crutch. 

Every cradle asks us " Whence ? " and every 
coffin " Whither ?" The poor barbarian, weeping 
above his dead, can answer these questions just as 
well as the robed priest of the most authentic 
creed. The tearful ignorance of the one, is as con- 
soling as the learned and unmeaning words of 
the other. No man, standing where the horizon 
of a life has touched a grave, has any right to 
prophesy a future filled with pain and tears. 

May be that death gives all there is of worth to 
life. If those we press and strain within our arms 

JL 

could never die, perhaps that love would wither 
from the earth. May be this common fate treads 
from out the paths between our hearts the weeds 
of selfishness and hate. And I had rather live 
and love where death is king, than have eternal 
life where love is not. Another life is nought, 
unless we know and love again the ones who 
love us here. 



AT A CHILD S GRAVE. 4 1 

They who stand with breaking hearts around 
this little grave, need have no fear. The larger 
and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, 
tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect 
rest. We know that through the common wants 
of life — the needs and duties of each hour — their 
grief will lessen day by day, until at last this grave 
will be to them a place of rest and peace — almost 
of joy. There is for them this consolation : The 
dead do not suffer. If they live again, their lives 
will surely be as good as ours. We have no fear. 
We are all children of the same mother, and the 
same fate awaits us all. We, too, have our religion, 
and it is this: Help for the living — Hope for the 
dead. 



BENEFITS FOR INJURIES. 




O render benefits for injuries is to ignore 
all distinctions between actions. He 
who treats his friends and enemies alike, 
has neither love nor justice. The idea 
of non-resistance never occurred to a 
man with power to protect himself. 
This doctrine was the child of weakness, born when 
resistance was impossible. To allow a crime to be 
committed when you can prevent it, is next to com- 
mitting the crime yourself. And yet, under the 
banner of non-resistance, the Church has shed the 
blood of millions, and in the folds of her sacred vest- 
ments have gleamed the daggers of assassination. 
With her cunning hands she wove the purple for 
hypocrisy, and placed the crown upon the brow of 
crime. For a thousand years larceny held the scales of 
justice, while beggars scorned the princely sons of toil, 
and ignorant fear denounced the liberty of thought. 
My doctrine is this : For good, return good ; for evil, 
return justice without admixture of revenge. 



WE BUILD. 




S it nothing to free the mind ? Is it nothing 
to civilize mankind ? Is it nothing to fill 
the world with light, with discovery, with 
science ? Is it nothing to dignify man 
and exalt the intellect ? Is it nothing to 
grope your way into the dreary prisons, 
the damp and dropping dungeons, the dark and 
silent cells of superstition, where the souls of men are 
chained to floors of stone ; to greet them like a ray 
of light, like the song of a bird, the murmur of a 
stream ; to see the dull eyes open and grow slowly 
bright ; to feel yourself grasped by the shrunken and 
unused hands, and hear yourself thanked by a strange 
and hollow voice ? 

Is it nothing to conduct these souls gradually into 
the blessed light of day — to let them see again the 
happy fields, the sweet, green earth, and hear the 



44 WE BUILD. 

everlasting music of the waves ? Is it nothing to 
make men wipe the dust from their swollen knees, 
the tears from their blanched and furrowed cheeks ? 
Is it a small thing to reave the heavens of an insatiate 
monster and write upon the eternal dome, glittering 
with stars, the grand word — Freedom ? 

Is it a small thing to quench the flames of hell 
with the holy tears of pity ; to unbind the martyr 
from the stake ; break all the chains ; put out the fires 
of civil war ; stay the sword of the fanatic, and tear 
the bloody hands of the Church from the white throat 
of Science ? 

Is it a small thing to make men truly free — to de- 
stroy the dogmas of ignorance, prejudice and power 
— the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from 
the beautiful face of the earth the fiend of Fear ? 



A TRIBUTE 



TO THE REV. ALEXANDER CLARK. 




PON the grave of the Reverend Alex- 
ander Clark I wish to place one flower. 
Utterly destitute of cold, dogmatic 
pride, that often passes for the love 
of God ; without the arrogance of the 
" elect" ; simple, free, and kind — this 
earnest man made me his friend by being mine. I 
forgot that he was a Christian, and he seemed to 
forget that I was not, while each remembered that 
the other was at least a man. 

Frank, candid, and sincere, he practiced what he 
preached, and looked with the holy eyes of charity 
upon the failings and mistakes of men. He believed 
in the power of kindness, and spanned with divine 
sympathy the hideous gulf that separates the fallen 
from the pure. 



46 A TRIBUTE. 

Giving freely to others the rights that he claimed 
for himself, it never occurred to him that his God 
hated a brave and honest unbeliever. He remem- 
bered that even an infidel had rights that love 
respects ; that hatred has no saving power, and that 
in order to be a Christian it is not necessary to 
become less than a human being. He knew that no 
one can be maligned into kindness ; that epithets 
cannot convince ; that curses are not arguments, and 
that the finger of scorn never points towards heaven. 
With the generosity of an honest man, he accorded 
to all the fullest liberty of thought, knowing, as he 
did, that in the realm of mind a chain is but a curse. 

For this man I felt the greatest possible regard. 
In spite of the taunts and jeers of his brethren, he 
publicly proclaimed that he would treat infidels with 
fairness and respect; that he would endeavor to 
convince them by argument and win them with love. 
He insisted that the God he worshiped loved the 
well-being even of an atheist. In this grand position 
he stood almost alone. Tender, just, and loving 
where others were harsh, vindictive, and cruel, he 
challenged the admiration of every honest man. A 
few more such clergymen might drive calumny from 



A TRIBUTE. 47 

the lips of faith and render the pulpit worthy of 
esteem. 

The heartiness and kindness with which this 
generous man treated me can never be excelled. 
He admitted that I had not lost, and could not lose, 
a single right by the expression of my honest thought. 
Neither did he believe that a servant could win the 
respect of a generous master by persecuting and 
maligning those whom the master would willingly 
forgive. 

While this good man was living, his brethren 
blamed him for having treated me with fairness. 
But, I trust, now that he has left the shore touched 
by the mysterious sea that never yet has borne, on 
any wave, the image of a homeward sail, this crime 
will be forgiven him by those who still remain to 
preach the love of God. 

His sympathies were not confined within the 
prison of a creed, but ran out and over the walls like 
vines, hiding the cruel rocks and rusted bars with 
leaf and flower. He could not echo with his heart 
the fiendish sentence of eternal fire. In spite of book 
and creed, he read " between the lines" the words 
of tenderness and love, with promises for all the 



48 A TRIBUTE. 

world. Above, beyond, the dogmas of his church — 
humane even to the verge of heresy — causing some 
to doubt his love of God because he failed to hate 
his unbelieving fellow-men, he labored for the welfare 
of mankind, and to his work gave up his life with all 
his heart. 



THE GRANT BANQUBT. 



THE GRANT BANQUET 

AT THE 

Palmer House, Chicago, Thursday, November ijth, 1879. 



TWELFTH TOAST I 

The Volunteer Soldiers of the Union, whose valor and patriotism saved the world 
'a government of the people, by the people, and for the people." 




HEN the savagery of the lash, the bar- 
barism of the chain, and the insanity 
of secession confronted the civilization 
of our country, the question " Will the 
great Republic defend itself?" trembled 
on the lips of every lover of mankind. 
The North, filled with intelligence and wealth — 
children of liberty — marshaled her hosts and asked 
only for a leader. From civil life a man, silent, 
thoughtful, poised and calm, stepped forth, and with 
the lips of victory voiced the Nation's first and last 
demand : " Unconditional and immediate surrender." 
From that moment the end was known. That 
utterance was the first real declaration of real war, 
and, in accordance with the dramatic unities of 



52 THE GRANT BANQUET. 

mighty events, the great soldier who made it, re- 
ceived the final sword of the rebellion. 

The soldiers of the Republic were not seekers 
after vulgar glory. They were not animated by 
the hope of plunder or the love of conquest. They 
fought to preserve the homestead of liberty and 
that their children might have peace. They were 
the defenders of humanity, the destroyers of preju- 
dice, the breakers of chains, and in the name of the 
future they slew the monster of their time. They 
finished what the soldiers of the Revolution com- 
menced. They re-lighted the torch that fell from 
their august hands and filled the world again with 
light. They blotted from the statute-books laws 
that had been passed by hypocrites at the instigation 
of robbers, and tore with indignant hands from the 
Constitution that infamous clause that made men 
the catchers of their fellow-men. They made it 
possible for judges to be just, for statesmen to be 
humane, and for politicians to be honest. They 
broke the shackles from the limbs of slaves, from 
the souls of masters, and from the Northern brain. 
They kept our country on the map of the world, 
and our flag in heaven. They rolled the stone from 



THE GRANT BANQUET. 53 

the sepulchre of progress, and found therein two 
angels clad in shining garments — Nationality and 
Liberty. 

The soldiers were the saviors of the Nation ; 
they were the liberators of men. In writing the 
Proclamation of Emancipation, Lincoln, greatest of 
our mighty dead, whose memory is as gentle as 
the summer air when reapers sing amid the gath- 
ered sheaves, copied with the pen what Grant and 
his brave comrades wrote with swords. 

Grander than the Greek, nobler than the Roman, 
the soldiers of the Republic, with patriotism as 
shoreless as the air, battled for the rights of others, 
for the nobility of labor; fought that mothers might 
own their babes, that arrogant idleness should not 
scar the back of patient toil, and that our country 
should not be a many-headed monster made of 
warring states, but a Nation, sovereign, great, and 
free. 

Blood was water, money was leaves, and life 
was only common air until one flag floated over a 
Republic without a master and without a slave. 

And then was asked the question : " Will a free 
people tax themselves to pay a Nation's debt?" 



54 THE GRANT BANQUET. 

The soldiers went home to their waiting wives, 
to their glad children, and to the girls they loved — 
they went back to the fields, the shops, and mines. 
They had not been demoralized. They had been 
ennobled. They were as honest in peace as they 
had been brave in war. Mocking at poverty, 
laughing at reverses, they made a friend of toil. 
They said: "We saved the Nation's life, and 
what is life without honor?" They worked and 
wrought with all of labor's royal sons that every 
pledge the Nation gave might be redeemed. And 
their great leader, having put a shining band of 
friendship — a girdle of clasped and happy hands — 
around the globe, comes home and finds that every 
promise made in war has now the ring and gleam 
of gold. 

There is another question still: — " Will all the 
wounds of war be healed?" I answer, yes. The 
Southern people must submit, — not to the dictation 
of the North, but to the Nation's will, and to the 
verdict of mankind. They were wrong, and the 
time will come when they will say that they are 
victors who have been vanquished by the right. 
Freedom conquered them, and freedom will cultivate 



THE GRANT BANQUET. 55 

their fields, educate their children, weave for them 
the robes of wealth, execute their laws, and fill 
their land with happy homes. 

The soldiers of the Union saved the South as 
well as the North. They made us a Nation. Their 
victory made us free and rendered tyranny in every 
other land as insecure as snow upon volcanoes' lips. 

And now let us drink to the volunteers — to 
those who sleep in unknown, sunken graves, whose 
names are only in the hearts of those they loved 
and left — of those who only hear in happy dreams 
the footsteps of return. Let us drink to those who 
died where lipless famine mocked at want ; to all 
the maimed whose scars give modesty a tongue; 
to all who dared and gave to chance the care and 
keeping of their lives ; to all the living and to all 
the dead, — to Sherman, to Sheridan, and to Grant, 
the laureled soldier of the world, and last, to Lincoln, 
whose loving life, like a bow of peace, spans and 
arches all the clouds of war. 



APOSTROPHE TO LIBERTY. 



« LIBERTY, thou art the God of my 
idolatry ! Thou art the only Deity that 
hates the bended knee ! In thy vast 
and unwalled temple, beneath the roof- 
less dome, star-gemmed and luminous 
with suns, thy worshipers stand erect ! 
They do not cringe, or crawl, or bend their foreheads 
to the earth. The dust has never borne the impress 
of their lips. 

Upon thy altars mothers do not sacrifice their 
babes, nor men their rights. Thou askest nought 
from man except the things that good men hate, — the 
whip, the chain, the dungeon key. 

Thou hast no popes, no priests, who stand be- 
tween their fellow-men and thee. Thou carest 
not for slavish forms, or selfish prayers. Thou 



58 LIBERTY. 

hast no monks, no nuns, who in the name of duty 
murder joy. 

At thy sacred shrine Hypocrisy does not bow, 
Fear does not crouch, Virtue does not tremble, 
Superstition's feeble tapers do not burn, but Reason 
holds aloft her inextinguishable torch, while on the 
ever-broadening brow of Science falls the ever- 
coming morning of the ever better day. 



A TRIBUTE TO JOHN G. MILLS. 




GAIN we are face to face with the great 
mystery that shrouds this world. We 
question, but there is no reply. Out on 
the wide waste seas, there drifts no 
spar. Over the desert of death the 
sphinx" gazes forever, but never speaks. 

In the very May of life another heart has ceased 
to beat. Night has fallen upon noon. But he 
lived, he loved, he was loved. Wife and children 
pressed their kisses on his lips. This is enough. 
The longest life contains no more. This fills the 
vase of joy. 

He who lies here, clothed with the perfect peace 
of death, was a kind and loving husband, a good 
father, a generous neighbor, an honest man, — and 
these words build a monument of glory above the 
humblest grave. He was always a child, sincere 
and frank, as full of hope as Spring. He divided 



60 A TRIBUTE. 

all time into to-day and to-morrow. To-morrow 
was without a cloud, and of to-morrow he borrowed 
sunshine for to-day. He was my friend. He will 
remain so. The living oft become estranged ; the 
dead are true. He was not a Christian. In the 
Eden of his hope there did not crawl and coil the 
serpent of eternal pain. In many languages he 
sought the thoughts of men, and for himself he 
solved the problems of the world. He accepted the 
philosophy of Auguste Comte. Humanity was his 
God ; the human race was his Supreme Being. In 
that Supreme Being he put his trust. He believed 
that we are indebted for what we enjoy to the labor, 
the self-denial, the heroism of the human race, and 
that as we have plucked the fruit of what others 
planted, we in thankfulness should plant for others 
yet to be. 

With him immortality was the eternal conse- 
quences of his own acts. He believed that every 
pure thought, every disinterested deed, hastens the 
harvest of universal good. This is a religion that 
enriches poverty ; that enables us to bear the sor- 
rows of the saddest life ; that peoples even solitude 
with the happy millions yet to live, — a religion born 



A TRIBUTE. 6 1 

not of selfishness and fear, but of love, of grati- 
tude, and hope, — a religion that digs wells to slake 
the thirst of others, and gladly bears the burdens of 
the unborn. 

But in the presence of death, how beliefs and 
dogmas wither and decay ! How loving words and 
deeds burst into blossom ! Pluck from the tree of 
any life these flowers, and there remain but the 
barren thorns of bigotry and creed. 

All wish for happiness beyond this life. All hope 
to meet again the loved and lost. In every heart 
there grows this sacred flower. Immortality is a 
word that Hope through all the ages has been whis- 
pering to Love. The miracle of thought we cannot 
understand. The mystery of life and death we 
cannot comprehend. This chaos called the world has 
never been explained. The golden bridge of life 
from gloom emerges, and on shadow rests. Beyond 
this we do not know. Fate is speechless, destiny is 
dumb, and the secret of the future has never yet 
been told. We love ; we wait ; we hope. The more 
we love, the more we fear. Upon the tenderest heart 
the deepest shadows fall. All paths, whether filled 
with thorns or flowers, end here. Here success and 



62 A TRIBUTE. 

failure are the same. The rag of wretchedness and 
the purple robe of power all difference and distinction 
lose in this democracy of death. Character survives ; 
goodness lives ; love is immortal. 

And yet to all a time may come when the fevered 
lips of life will long for the cool, delicious kiss of 
death — when tired of the dust and glare of day we 
all shall hear with joy the rustling garments of 
the night. 

What can we say of death ? What can we say 
of the dead ? Where they have gone, reason cannot 
go, and from thence revelation has not come. But 
let us believe that over the cradle Nature bends 
and smiles, and lovingly above the dead in bene- 
diction holds her outstretched hands. 



THE WARP AND WOOF. 




HE rise and set of sun, the birth and death 
of day, the dawns of silver and the dusks 
of gold, the wonders of the rain and 
snow, the shroud of winter and the many- 
colored robes of spring, the lonely moon 
with nightly loss or gain, the serpent 
lightning and the thunder's voice, the tempest's fury 
and the breath of morn, the threat of storm and 
promise of the bow ; cathedral clouds with dome and 
spire, earthquake and strange eclipse, frost and fire, 
the snow-crowned mountains with their tongues of 
flame, the fields of space sown thick with stars, the 
wandering comets, the fixed and sleepless sentinels 
of night, — the marvels of the earth and air; the per- 
fumed flower, the painted wing, the waveless pool 
that held within its magic breast the image of the 



64 THE WARP AND WOOF. 

startled face and the inverted sky, the mimic echo 
that made a record in the viewless air ; the pathless 
forests and the boundless seas, the ebb and flow of 
tides, the slow deep breathing of some vague and 
monstrous life, the miracle of birth, the mystery of 
dream and death, and over all the silent and immeas- 
urable dome, — these were the warp and woof, and 
at the loom sat Love and Fancy, Hope and Fear, 
and wove the wondrous tapestries whereon we find 
pictures of gods and fairy lands and all the legends 
that were told when Nature rocked the cradle of the 
infant world. 



THE CEMETERY. 




N that vast cemetery called the past, are ' 
most of the religions of men, and there, 
too, are nearly all their gods. The sacred 
temples of India were ruins long ago. 
Over column and cornice, over the painted 
and pictured walls, cling and creep the 
trailing vines. Brahma, the golden, with four heads 
and four arms ; Vishnu, the sombre, the punisher 
of the wicked, with his three eyes, his crescent, and 
his necklace of skulls ; Siva, the destroyer, red with 
seas of blood ; Kali, the goddess ; Draupadi, the 
white-armed, and Chrishna, the Christ, all passed 
away and left the thrones of heaven desolate. Along 
the banks of the sacred Nile, Isis no longer wander- 
ing weeps, searching for the dead Osiris. The 
shadow of Typhon's scowl falls no more upon the 
waves. The sun rises as of yore, and his golden 



66 THE CEMETERY. 

beams still smite the lips of Memnon, but Memnon 
is as voiceless as the Sphinx. The sacred fanes are 
lost in desert sands ; the dusty mummies are still 
waiting for the resurrection promised by their priests, 
and the old beliefs, wrought in curiously sculptured 
stone, sleep in the mystery of a language lost and 
dead. Odin, the author of life and soul, Vili and 
Ve, and the mighty giant Ymir, strode long ago 
from the icy halls of the North ; and Thor, with iron 
glove and glittering hammer, dashes mountains to 
the earth no more. Broken are the circles and crom- 
lechs of the ancient Druids ; fallen upon the summits 
of the hills, and covered with the centuries' moss, 
are the sacred cairns. The divine fires of Persia and 
of the Aztecs, have died out in the ashes of the past, 
and there is none to rekindle, and none to feed the holy 
flames. The harp of Orpheus is still ; the drained 
cup of Bacchus has been thrown aside ; Venus 
lies dead in stone, and her white bosom heaves no 
more with love. The streams still murmur, but no 
naiads bathe ; the trees still wave, but in the forest 
aisles no dryads dance. The gods have flown from 
high Olympus. Not even the beautiful women can 
lure them back, and Danae lies unnoticed, naked to 



THE CEMETERY. 67 

the stars. Hushed forever are the thunders of Sinai ; 
lost are the voices of the prophets, and the land once 
flowing with milk and honey is but a desert waste. 
One by one, the myths have faded from the clouds ; 
one by one, the phantom host has disappeared, 
and one by one, facts, truths and realities have taken 
their places. The supernatural has almost gone, 
but the natural remains. The gods have fled, but 
man is here. 

Nations, like individuals, have their periods of 
youth, of manhood and decay. Religions are the 
same. The same inexorable destiny awaits them 
all. The gods created by the nations must perish 
with their creators. They were created by men, and 
like men, they must pass away. The deities of one 
age are the by-words of the next. The religion 
of our day, and country, is no more exempt from 
the sneer of the future than the others have been. 
When India was supreme, Brahma sat upon the 
world's throne. When the sceptre passed to Egypt, 
Isis and Osiris received the homage of mankind. 
Greece, with her fierce valor, swept to empire, and 
Zeus put on the purple of authority. The earth 
trembled with the tread of Rome's intrepid sons, 



68 THE CEMETERY. 

and Jove grasped with mailed hand the thunderbolts 
of heaven. Rome fell, and Christians, from her ter- 
ritory, with the red sword of war carved out the 
ruling nations of the world, and now Christ sits 
upon the old throne. Who will be his successor ? 



ORIGINALITY. 




N argument is new until it has been 
answered. An argument is absolutely 
fresh, and has upon its leaves the dew 
of morning, until it has been refuted. 

All men have experienced, it may be, 
in some degree, what we call love. 
Millions of men have written about it. The subject 
of course is old. It is only the presentation that can 
be new. Thousands of men have attacked superstition. 
The subject is old, but the manner in which the facts 
are handled, the arguments grouped — these may be 
forever new. 

Millions of men have preached Christianity. Cer- 
tainly there is nothing new in the original ideas. 
Nothing can be new except the presentation, the 
grouping. The ideas may be old, but they may be 
clothed in new garments of passion ; they may be 



70 ORIGINALITY. 

given additional human interest. A man takes a fact, 
or an old subject, as a sculptor takes a rock : the rock 
is not new. Of this rock he makes a statue : the 
statue is new. And yet some orthodox man might 
say: " There is nothing new about that statue; I 
know the man that dug the rock ; I know the owner 
of the quarry." 

Substance is eternal ; forms are new. So in the 
human mind certain ideas, or in the human heart cer- 
tain passions, are forever old ; but genius forever 
gives them new forms, new meanings ; and this is the 
perpetual originality of genius. 



THEN AND NOW. 




INCE the murder of Hypatia in the fifth 
century, when the polished blade of Greek 
philosophy was broken by the club of 
ignorant Catholicism, until to-day, su- 
perstition has detested every effort of 
reason. 

It is almost impossible to conceive of the com- 
pleteness of the victory that the church achieved 
over philosophy. For ages science was utterly 
ignored ; thought was a poor slave ; an ignorant 
priest was master of the world ; faith put out the 
eyes of the soul ; reason was a trembling coward ; 
the imagination was set on fire of hell ; every human 
feeling was sought to be suppressed ; love was con- 
sidered infinitely sinful ; pleasure was the road to 
eternal fire, and God was supposed to be happy only 
when his children were miserable. The world was 



72 THEN AND NOW. 

governed by an Almighty's whim; prayers could 
change the order of things, halt the grand procession 
of nature, — could produce rain, avert pestilence, famine 
and death in all its forms. There was no idea of 
the certain; all depended upon divine pleasure — or 
displeasure, rather; heaven was full of inconsistent 
malevolence, and earth of ignorance. Everything 
was done to appease the divine wrath. Every public 
calamity was caused by the sins of the people ; 
generally by a failure to pay tithes. To the poor 
multitude, the earth was a kind of enchanted forest, full 
of demons ready to devour, and theological serpents 
lurking with infinite power to fascinate and torture 
the unhappy and impotent soul. Life to them was a 
dim and mysterious labyrinth, in which they wandered 
weary and lost, guided by priests as bewildered as 
themselves, without knowing that at every step the 
Ariadne of reason offered them the long lost clue. 

The very heavens were full of death ; the light- 
ning was regarded as the glittering vengeance of God, 
and the earth was thick with snares for the unwary 
feet of man. The soul was supposed to be crowded 
with the wild beasts of desire ; the heart to be totally 
corrupt, prompting only to crime. Virtues were re- 



THEN AND NOW. 73 

garded as deadly sins in disguise. There was a 
continual warfare being waged between the Deity 
and the Devil, for the possession of every soul ; the 
latter generally being considered victorious. The 
flood, the tornado, the volcano, were all evidences 
of the displeasure of heaven, and the sinfulness of 
man. The blight that withered, the frost that black- 
ened, the earthquake that devoured, were the 
messengers of the Creator. 

The world was governed by Fear. 

Against all the evils of nature, there was known 
only the defense of prayer, of fasting, of credulity, 
and devotion. Man in his helplessness endeavored 
to soften the heart of God. The faces of the multi- 
tude were blanched with fear, and wet with tears. 
The world was the prey of hypocrites, kings and 
priests. 

My heart bleeds when I contemplate the suffer- 
ings endured by the millions now dead ; of those 
who lived when the world appeared to be insane ; 
when the heavens were filled with an infinite Horror 
who snatched babes with dimpled hands and rosy 
cheeks from the white breasts of mothers, and dashed 
them into an abyss of eternal flame. 



74 THEN AND NOW. 

Slowly, like the coming of the dawn, came the 
grand truth that the universe is governed by law ; 
that disease fastens itself upon the good and upon the 
bad ; that the tornado cannot be stopped by counting 
beads ; that the rushing lava pauses not for bended 
knees, the lightning for clasped and uplifted hands, 
nor the cruel waves of the sea for prayer ; that paying 
tithes causes, rather than prevents, famine ; that pleas- 
ure is not sin ; that happiness is the only good ; that 
demons and gods exist only in the imagination ; that 
faith is a lullaby sung to put the soul to sleep; that de- 
votion is a bribe that fear offers to supposed power ; 
that offering rewards in another world for obedience in 
this, is simply buying a soul on credit ; that knowl- 
edge consists in ascertaining the laws of nature, and 
that wisdom is the science of happiness. 



VOLTAIRE. 



VOLTAIRE, 




assignation. 



HEN Voltaire was born, the Church 
ruled and owned France. It was a 
period of almost universal corruption. 
The priests were mostly libertines. The 
judges were as cruel as venal. The 
royal palace was simply a house of 
The nobles were heartless, proud and 
arrogant, to the last degree. The common people 
were treated as beasts. It took the Church a thous- 
and years to bring about this happy condition of 
things. 

The seeds of the revolution were unconsciously 
being scattered by every noble and by every priest. 
They germinated in the hearts of the helpless. They 
were watered by the tears of agony. Blows began 
to bear interest. There was a faint longing for 
blood. Workmen, blackened by the sun, bent by 



78 VOLTAIRE. 

labor, looked at the white throats of scornful ladies 
and thought about cutting them. 

In those days, witnesses were cross-examined 
with instruments of torture. The Church was the 
arsenal of superstition. Miracles, relics, angels and 
devils were as common as rags. Voltaire laughed 
at the evidences, attacked the pretended facts, held 
the bible up to ridicule, and filled Europe with indig- 
nant protests against the cruelty, bigotry, and in- 
justice of the time. 

He was a believer in God, and in some ingenious 
way excused this God for allowing the Catholic 
Church to exist. He had an idea that, originally, 
mankind were believers in one God, and practised all 
the virtues. Of course this was a mistake. He 
imagined that the Church had corrupted the human 
race. In this he was right. 

It may be that, at one time, the Church relatively 
stood for progress, but when it gained power, it 
became an obstruction. The system of Voltaire was 
contradictory. He described a being of infinite 
goodness, who not only destroyed his children with 
pestilence and famine, but allowed them to destroy 
each other. While rejecting the God of the Bible, 






VOLTAIRE. 79 

he accepted another God, who, to say the least, 
allowed the innocent to be burnt for loving him. 

Voltaire hated tyranny, and loved liberty. His ar- 
guments to prove the existence of a God were just as 
groundless as those of the reverend fathers of his day 
to prove the divinity of Christ, or that Mary was the 
mother of God. The theologians of his time maligned 
and feared him. He regarded them as a spider does 
flies. He spread nets for them. They were caught,, 
and he devoured them for the amusement and benefit 
of the public. He was educated by the Jesuits, and 
sometimes acted like one. 

It is fashionable to say that he was not profound. 
This is because he was not stupid. In the presence 
of absurdity he laughed, and was called irreverent. 
He thought God would not damn even a priest for- 
ever : — this was regarded as blasphemy. He en- 
deavored to prevent Christians from murdering each 
other and did what he could to civilize the disciples 
of Christ. Had he founded a sect, obtained control 
of some country, and burned a few heretics at slow 
fires, he would have won the admiration, respect 
and love of the Christian world. Had he only pre- 
tended to believe all the fables of antiquity, had he 



80 VOLTAIRE. 

mumbled Latin prayers, counted beads, crossed him- 
self, devoured the flesh of God, and carried fagots to 
the feet of philosophy in the name of Christ, he might 
have been in heaven this moment, enjoying a sight 
of the damned. 

Instead of doing these things, he wilfully closed 
his eyes to the light of the gospel, examined the 
bible for himself, advocated intellectual liberty, struck 
from the brain the fetters of an arrogant faith, 
assisted the weak, cried out against the torture 
of man, appealed to reason, endeavored to establish 
universal toleration, succored the indigent and de- 
fended the oppressed. 

These were his crimes. Such a man God would 
not suffer to die in peace. If allowed to meet death 
with a smile, others might follow his example, until 
none would be left to light the holy fires of the auto 
da fe. It would not do for so great, so successful an 
enemy of the Church, to die without leaving some 
shriek of fear, some shuddering cry of remorse } 
some ghastly prayer of chattered horror, uttered by 
lips covered with blood and foam. 

He was an old man of eighty-four. He had been 
surrounded with the comforts of life ; he was a man 



VOLTAIRE. 8l 

of wealth — of genius. Among the literary men of 
the world, he stood first. God had allowed him 
to have the appearance of success. His last years 
were filled with the intoxication of flattery. He 
stood at the summit of his age. The priests became 
anxious. They began to fear that God would forget, 
in a multiplicity of business, to make a terrible ex- 
ample of Voltaire. Toward the last of May, 1778, 
it was whispered in Paris that Voltaire was dying. 
Upon the fences of expectation gathered the unclean 
birds of superstition, impatiently waiting for their 
prey. 

"Two days before his death, his nephew went to 
seek the cure of Saint Sulpice and the Abbe Gautier 
and brought them into his uncle's sick chamber, who 
being informed that they were there, ' Ah, well ! ■ 
said Voltaire, i give them my compliments and my 
thanks.' The Abbe spoke some words to him, ex- 
horting him to patience. The cure of Saint Sulpice 
then came forward, having announced himself, and 
asked of Voltaire, elevating his voice, if he acknowl- 
edged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. The 
sick man pushed one of his hands against the cure's 
coif, shoving him back, and cried, turning abruptly to 



82 VOLTAIRE. 

the other side, ' Let me die in peace.' The cure 
seemingly considered his person soiled, and his coif 
dishonored, by the touch of the philosopher. He 
made the nurse give him a little brushing, and went 
out with the Abbe Gautier." 

He expired, says Wagniere, on the 30th of May, 
1778, at about quarter past eleven at night, with 
the most perfect tranquillity. Ten minutes before 
his last breath he took the hand of Morand, his valet 
de chambre, who was watching by him, pressed it 
and said: " Adieu, my dear Morand, I am gone." 
These were his last words. 

From this death, so simple and serene, so natural 
and peaceful ; from these words so utterly destitute 
of cant or dramatic touch, all the frightful pictures, 
all the despairing utterances, have been drawn and 
made. From these materials, and from these alone, 
have been constructed all the shameless calumnies 
about the death of this great and wonderful man, 
compared with whom all of his calumniators, dead 
and living, were and are but dust and vermin. 

More than a century ago Catholicism, wrapped 
in robes red with the innocent blood of millions, 
holding in her frantic clutch crowns and scepters, 



VOLTAIRE. 83 

honors and gold, the keys of heaven and hell, 
trampling beneath her feet the liberties of nations, 
in the proud moment of almost universal dominion, 
felt within her heartless breast the deadly dagger 
of Voltaire. From that blow the Church never 
can recover. Livid with hatred, she launched her 
impotent anathema at the great destroyer, and igno- 
rant Protestants have echoed the curse of Rome. 

Voltaire was the intellectual autocrat of his time. 
From his throne at the foot of the Alps, he pointed 
the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Europe. 
He was the pioneer of his century. He was the 
assassin of superstition. Through the shadows of 
faith and fable, through the darkness of myth and 
miracle, through the midnight of Christianity, through 
the blackness of bigotry, past cathedral and dun- 
geon, past rack and stake, past altar and throne, 
he carried, with chivalric hands, the sacred torch of 
reason. 



LAZARUS. 




HAT became of Lazarus? We never 
hear of him again. It seems to me 
that he would have been an object of 
great interest. People would have said: 
" He is the man who was once dead." 
Thousands would have inquired of him 
about the other world ; would have asked him where 
he was when he received the information that he was 
wanted on the earth. His experience would have 
been vastly more interesting than everything else in 
the New Testament. A returned traveler from the 
shores of Eternity — one who had walked twice 
through the valley of the shadow — would have been 
the most interesting of human beings. When he came 
to die again, people would have said: " He is not 
afraid ; he has had experience ; he knows what death 
is." But, strangely enough, this Lazarus fades into 
obscurity with " the wise men of the East," and with 
the dead who came out of their graves on the night 
of the crucifixion. 



WHAT IS WORSHIP ? 




O do justice ; to defend the right ; to be 
strength for the weak, — a shield for the 
defenceless ; to raise the fallen ; to keep 
the peace between neighbors and nations. 
This is worship. 

Work is worship. Labor is the best 
prayer. To fell the forest, to subdue the earth, to 
delve in mines for the love of woman. This is 
worship. 

To build a home, to keep a fire on the hearth, to 
fill with joy the heart of her who rocks the cradle of 
your child. This is worship. 

The poor boy ships before the mast — comes home 
and puts within his mother's hand a purse snatched 
from the peril of the sea. This is worship. 

The poor widow working night and day keeping 
the fatherless together, — bearing every burden for the 
love of babes. This is worship. 



86 WHAT IS WORSHIP? 

The sad and weeping wife stays with and bears 
the insults of a brutal husband for the sake of little 
ones. This is worship. 

The husband, when his wife is prematurely old 
with grief and pain, sits by her bed and holds her 
thin wan hands as rapturously and kisses them as 
passionately as when they were dimpled. This is 
worship. 

The wife clings to the husband fallen, lifts him 
from the gutter of degradation, holds him to her heart 
until her love makes him once more a man. This is 
worship. 

The industrious father, the toiling, patient mother, 
practice every self-denial to educate their children, — 
to lift them with loving pride above themselves. This 
is worship. 

And when such children are ashamed of such 
parents because they are homely and wrinkled and 
ignorant, — this is blasphemy. 

The boy with his mother's kiss warm on his lips 
fights for his native land, — fights to free his fellow 
men, — dies by the guns. This is worship. 

He who loves, worships. 



HUMBOLDT. 




T the head of the great army of investiga- 
tors stood Humboldt — the serene leader 
of an intellectual host— a king by the 
suffrage of Science and the divine right 
of Genius. 
And to-day we are not honoring some butcher 
called a soldier, some wily politician called a 
statesman, some robber called a king, nor some 
malicious metaphysician called a saint. We are 
honoring the grand Humboldt, whose victories were 
all achieved in the arena of thought ; who de- 
stroyed prejudice, ignorance and error — not men ; 
who shed light — not blood, and who contributed 
to the knowledge, the wealth, and the happiness 
of mankind. 

We honor him because he has ennobled our race; 
because he has contributed as much as any man 



88 HUMBOLDT. 

living or dead, to the real prosperity of the world. 
We honor him because he has honored us, because 
he labored for others, because he was the most 
learned man of the most learned nation — because 
he left a legacy of glory to every human being. 

We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, 
continents, mountains, and volcanoes ; with the great 
palms, the wide deserts, the snow-lipped craters 
of the Andes ; with primeval forests and European 
capitals ; with wildernesses and universities ; with 
savages and savans ; with the lonely rivers of un- 
peopled wastes ; with peaks and pampas and steppes 
and cliffs and crags — with the progress of the 
world — with every science known to man, and 
with every star glittering in the immensity of space. 
^Humboldt adopted none of the soul-shrinking 
creeds of his day ; wasted none of his time in the 
stupidities, inanities and contradictions of theological 
metaphysics. He did not endeavor to harmonize the 
astronomy and geology of a barbarous people with 
the science of the Nineteenth Century. Never, for 
one moment, did he abandon the sublime standard 
of truth. He investigated, he studied, he thought, he 
separated the gold from the dross in the crucible of 



HUMBOLDT. 89 

his great brain. He was never found on his knees 
before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by 
the grand tranquil column of Reason. He was an 
admirer, a lover, an adorer of Nature, and at the 
age of ninety, bowed by the weight of nearly a 
century, covered with the insignia of honor, loved 
by a nation, respected by a world, with kings for 
his servants, he laid his weary head upon the 
bosom of the universal Mother — and with her arms 
around him, sank into that mysterious slumber known 
as death. 



GOD SILENT. 




HERE is no recorded instance where the 
uplifted hand of murder has been par- 
alyzed — no truthful account in all the 
literature of the world, of the innocent 
shielded by God. Thousands of crimes 
are being committed every day. Men 
are, this moment, lying in wait for their human prey. 
Wives are whipped and crushed — driven to insanity 
and death. Little children are begging for mercy — 
lifting imploring, tear-filled eyes, to the brutal faces 
of fathers and mothers. Sweet girls are being de- 
ceived, lured and outraged ; but God has no time to 
prevent these things — no time to defend the good 
and to protect the pure. He is too busy numbering 
hairs and watching sparrows. 



ALCOHOL. 




BELIEVE that alcohol, to a certain de- 
gree, demoralizes those who make it, 
those who sell it, and those who drink it. 
I believe from the time it issues from the 
coiled and poisonous worm of the dis- 
tillery until it empties into the hell of 
crime, death, and dishonor, it demoralizes everybody 
that touches it. I do not believe that anybody can 
contemplate the subject without becoming prejudiced 
against this liquid crime. All you have to do is 
to think of the wrecks upon either bank of this stream 
of death — of the suicides, of the insanity, of the 
poverty, of the ignorance, of the distress, of the little 
children tugging at the faded dresses of weeping and 
despairing wives, asking for bread ; of the men 
of genius it has wrecked ; of the millions who have 



92 ALCOHOL. 

struggled with imaginary serpents produced by this 
devilish thing. And when you think of the jails, 
of the almshouses, of the prisons, and of the scaffolds 
upon either bank — I do not wonder that every 
thoughtful man is prejudiced against the damned 
stuff called alcohol. 



AUGUSTE COMTE. 




NABLE in some things to rise above the 
superstitions of his day, Comte adopted 
not only the machinery, but some of the 
prejudices, of Catholicism. He made the 
mistake of Luther. He tried to reform 
the Church of Rome. Destruction is 
the only reformation of which that church is capable. 
Every religion is based upon a misconception, not 
only of the cause of phenomena, but of the real object 
of life ; that is to say, upon falsehood ; and the 
moment the truth is known and understood, these 
religions must fall. In the field of thought, they are 
briers, thorns, and noxious weeds ; on the shores of 
intellectual discovery, they are sirens, and in the 
forests that the brave thinkers are now penetrating, 
they are the wild beasts, fanged and monstrous. 
You cannot reform these weeds. Sirens cannot be 
changed into good citizens; and such wild beasts, 



94 AUGUSTE COMTE. 

even when tamed, are of no possible use. Destruc- 
tion is the only remedy. Reformation is a hospital 
where the new philosophy exhausts its strength 
nursing the old religion. 

There was, in the brain of the great Frenchman, 
the dawn of that happy day in which humanity will 
be the only religion, good the only god, happiness 
the only object, restitution the only atonement, 
mistake the only sin, and affection, guided by in- 
telligence, the only savior of mankind. This dawn 
illuminated the darkness of his life, and filled his eyes 
with proud and tender tears. 

A few years ago I asked the superintendent of 
Pere La Chaise if he knew where I could find the 
tomb of Auguste Comte. He had never heard even 
the name of the author of the Positive Philosophy. 
I asked him if he had ever heard of Napoleon 
Bonaparte. In a half-insulted tone, he replied, " Of 
course I have, why do you ask me such a question?" 
"Simply," was my answer, "that I might have the 
opportunity of saying, that when everything con- 
nected with Napoleon, except his crimes, shall have 
been forgotten, Auguste Comte will be lovingly 
remembered as a benefactor of the human race." 



THE INFIDEL. 




O effort has been spared in any age of the 
world to crush out opposition. The 
Church used painting, music and archi- 
tecture, simply to degrade mankind. But 
there are men that nothing can awe. 
There have been at all times brave spirits 
that dared even the gods. Some proud head has 
always been above the waves. In every age some 
Diogenes has sacrificed to all the deities. True 
genius never cowers, and there is always some 
Samson feeling for the pillars of authority. 

Cathedrals and domes, and chimes and chants ; 
temples frescoed and groined and carved, and gilded 
with gold ; altars and tapers, and paintings of virgin 
and babe ; censer and chalice, chasuble, paten and 
alb ; organs, and anthems and incense rising to the 
winged and blest ; maniple, amice and stole ; crosses 



96 THE INFIDEL 

and crosiers, tiaras and crowns ; mitres and missals 
and masses ; rosaries, relics and robes ; martyrs and 
saints, and windows stained as with the blood of 
Christ — never, for one moment awed the brave, 
proud spirit of the Infidel. He knew that all the 
pomp and glitter had been purchased with Liberty — 
that priceless jewel of the soul. In looking at the 
cathedral he remembered the dungeon. The music 
of the organ was not loud enough to drown the clank 
of fetters. He could not forget that the taper had 
lighted the fagot. He knew that the cross adorned 
the hilt of the sword, and so where others worshiped, 
he wept. 



NAPOLEON, 




LITTLE while ago, I stood by the grave 
of the old Napoleon — a magnificent tomb 
of gilt and gold, fit almost for a deity- 
dead — -and gazed upon the sarcophagus 
of rare and nameless marble, where rest 
at last the ashes of that restless man. I leaned over 
the balustrade and thought about the career of the 
greatest soldier of the modern world. 

I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, 
contemplating suicide. I saw him at Toulon — I saw 
him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris — 
I saw him at the head of the army of Italy — I saw 
him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color 
in his hand — I saw him in Egypt in the shadows 
of the pyramids — I saw him conquer the Alps and 
mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the 



98 NAPOLEON. 

crags. I saw him at Marengo — at Ulm and Austerlitz. 
I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow 
and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions 
like winter's withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic 
in defeat and disaster — driven by a million bayonets 
back upon Paris — clutched like a wild beast — banished 
to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire 
by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the 
frightful field of Waterloo, where Chance and Fate 
combined to wreck the fortunes of their former 
king. And I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands 
crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and 
solemn sea. 

I thought of the orphans and widows he had 
made — of the tears that had been shed for his glory, 
and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed 
from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And 
I said, I would rather have been a French peasant 
and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived 
in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the 
grapes growing purple in the amorous kisses of the 
Autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor 
peasant, with my loving wife by my side, knitting 
as the day died out of the sky — with my children 



NAPOLEON. 99 

upon my knees and their arms about me — I would 
rather have been that man, and gone down to the 
tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have 
been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, 
known as Napoleon the Great. 



THE REPUBLIC 




N the republic of mind, one is a majority. 
There, all are monarchs, and all are equals. 
The tyranny of a majority even is un- 
known. Each one is crowned, sceptered 
and throned. Upon every brow is the 
tiara, and around every form is the im- 
perial purple. Only those are good citizens who 
express their honest thoughts, and those who persecute 
for opinion's sake, are the only traitors. There, 
nothing is considered infamous except an appeal to 
brute force, and nothing sacred but love, liberty, and 
joy. The church contemplates this republic with a 
sneer. From the teeth of hatred she draws back the lips 
of scorn. She is filled with the spite and spleen born of 
intellectual weakness. Once she was egotistic; now she 
is envious. Once she wore upon her hollow breast false 
gems, supposing them to be real. They have been 
shown to be false, but she wears them still. She has 
the malice of the caught, the hatred of the exposed. 



DAWN OF THE NEW DAY. 




EYOND the universe there is nothing, 
and within the universe the supernatural 
does not and cannot exist. 

The moment these great truths are 
understood and admitted, a belief in 
general or special providence becomes 
impossible. From that instant men will cease their 
vain efforts to please an imaginary being, and will 
give their time and attention to the affairs of this 
world. They will abandon the idea of attaining 
any object by prayer and supplication. The ele- 
ment of uncertainty will, in a great measure, be 
removed from the domain of the future, and man, 
gathering courage from a succession of victories 
over the obstructions of nature, will attain a serene 
grandeur unknown to the disciples of any super- 
stition. The plans of mankind will no longer be 



102 DAWN OF THE NEW DAY. 

interfered with by the finger of a supposed omnipo- 
tence, and no one will believe that nations or indi- 
viduals are protected or destroyed by any deity 
whatever. Science, freed from the chains of pious 
custom and evangelical prejudice, will, within her 
sphere, be supreme. The mind will investigate with- 
out reverence, and publish its conclusions without 
fear. Agassiz will no longer hesitate to declare the 
Mosaic cosmogony utterly inconsistent with the 
demonstrated truths of geology, and will cease pre- 
tending any reverence for the Jewish scriptures. The 
moment science succeeds in rendering the church 
powerless for evil, the real thinkers will be outspoken. 
The little flags of truce carried by timid philosophers 
will disappear, and the cowardly parley will give place 
to victory — lasting and universal. 



REFORMERS. 




OST reformers have infinite confidence 
in creeds, resolutions and laws. They 
think of the common people as raw 
material, out of which they propose 
to construct institutions and govern- 
ments, like mechanical contrivances, 
where each person will stand for a cog, rope, wheel, 
pulley, or bolt, and the reformers will be the mana- 
gers and directors. They forget that these cogs and 
wheels have opinions of their own ; that they fall 
out with other cogs, and refuse to turn with other 
wheels ; that the pulleys and ropes have ideas pecu- 
liar to themselves, and delight in mutiny and revolu- 
tion. These reformers have theories that can only 
be realized when other people have none. 

Some time, it will be found that people can be 



104 REFORMERS. 

changed only by changing their surroundings. It 
is alleged that, at least ninety-five per cent, of the 
criminals transported from England to Australia and 
other penal colonies, became good and useful citizens 
in a new world. Free from former associates and 
associations, from the necessities of a hard, cruel, 
and competitive civilization, they became, for the 
most part, honest people. This immense fact throws 
more light upon social questions than all the theories 
of the world. All people are not able to support 
themselves. They lack intelligence, industry, cunning 
— in short, capacity. They are continually falling 
by the way. In the midst of plenty, they are hungry. 
Larceny is born of want and opportunity. In pas- 
sion's storm, the will is wrecked upon the reefs and 
rocks of crime. 

The complex, tangled web of thought and dream, 
of perception and memory, of imagination and judg- 
ment, of wish, and will, and want — the woven 
wonder of a life — has never yet been raveled back 
to simple threads. 

Shall we not become charitable and just, when 
ive know that every act is but condition's fruit ; that 
Nature, with her countless hands, scatters the seeds 



REFORMERS. IO5 

of tears and crimes — of every virtue and of e very- 
joy; that all the base and vile are victims of the 
Blind, and that the good and great have, in the 
lottery of life, by chance or fate, drawn heart and 
brain ? 



THE GARDEN OF EDEN. 




T is not true that man was once perfectly 
pure and innocent, and became degenerate 
by disobedience. The real truth is, and 
the history of man shows, that he has 
advanced. Events, like the pendulum of a 
clock, have swung forward and backward, 
but after all, man, like the hands, has gone steadily 
on. Man is growing grander. He is not degenerating. 
Nations and individuals fail and die, and make room 
for higher forms. The intellectual horizon of the 
world widens as the centuries pass. Ideals grow 
stronger and purer; the difference between justice and 
mercy becomes less and less; liberty enlarges, and love 
intensifies as the years sweep on. The ages of force 
and fear, of cruelty and wrong, are behind, and the 
real Eden is beyond. It is said that a desire for knowl- 
edge lost us the Eden of the past ; but whether that is 
true or not, it will give us the Eden of the future. 



THOMAS PAINE. 



THOMAS PAINE. 




HOMAS PAINE was born in Thetford, 
England. He came from the common 
people. At the age of thirty-seven he 
left England for America. He was the 
first to perceive the destiny of the 
New World. He wrote the pamphlet 
" Common Sense," and in a few months the Con- 
tinental Congress declared the colonies free and 
independent States. A new nation was born. Paine 
having aroused the spirit of independence, gave every 
energy of his soul to keep that spirit alive. He was 
with the army. He shared its defeats and its glory. 
When the situation became desperate, he gave them 
" The Crisis." It was a pillar of cloud by day and 
of fire by night, leading the way to freedom, honor, 
and victory. 

The writings of Paine are gemmed with compact 
statements that carry conviction to the dullest. Day 



IIO THOMAS PAINE. 

and night he labored for America, until there was " a 
government of the people and for the people." At 
the close of the Revolution, no one stood higher than 
Thomas Paine. Had he been willing to live a hypo- 
crite, he would have been respectable, he would have 
died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death 
there would have been an imposing funeral, with 
miles of carriages, filled with hypocrites, and above 
his hypocritical dust, there would have been a hypo- 
critical monument covered with hypocritical praise. 

Having done so much for man in America, he 
went to France. The seeds sown by the great 
infidels were bearing fruit in Europe. The Eighteenth 
Century was crowning its gray hairs with the wreath 
of progress. Upon his arrival in France he was 
elected a memberof the French Convention — in fact, 
he was selected about the same time by the people of 
no less than four Departments. He was one of the 
committee to draft a Constitution for France. In the 
Assembly, where nearly all were demanding the 
execution of the king, he had the courage to vote 
against death. To vote against the death of the 
king was to vote against his own life. This was the 
sublimity of devotion to principle. For this he was 



THOMAS PAINE. Ill 

arrested, imprisoned, and doomed to death. While 
under the sentence of death, while in the gloomy cell 
of his prison, Thomas Paine wrote to Washington, 
asking him to say one word to Robespierre in favor 
of the author of " Common Sense." Washington 
did not reply. He wrote again. The answer was 
silence. In the calmness of power, the serenity of 
fortune, Washington, the President, read the request 
of Paine, the prisoner, and with the complacency of 
assured fame, consigned to the waste-basket of forget- 
fulness the patriot's cry for help. 

" Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, 

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, 

A great-sized monster of ingratitudes. 

Those scraps are good deeds past which are devour'd 

As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 

As done." 

In this controversy, my sympathies are with the 
prisoner. 

Thomas Paine, having done so much for political 
liberty, turned his attention to the superstitions of his 
age. He published "The Age of Reason;" and 
from that day to this, his character has been maligned 
by almost every priest in Christendom. He has 
been held up as the terrible example. Every man 



112 THOMAS PAINE. 

who has expressed an honest thought, has been 
warningly referred to Thomas Paine. All his ser- 
vices were forgotten. No kind word fell from any 
pulpit. His devotion to principle, his zeal for human 
rights, were no longer remembered. Paine simply 
took the ground that it is a contradiction to call a 
thing a revelation that comes to us second-hand. 
There can be no revelation beyond the first com- 
munication. All after that is hearsay. He also 
showed that the prophecies of the Old Testament 
had no relation whatever to Jesus Christ, and con- 
tended that Jesus Christ was simply a man. In other 
words, Paine was an enlightened Unitarian. Paine 
thought the Old Testament too barbarous to have 
been the work of an infinitely benevolent God. He 
attacked the doctrine that salvation depends upon 
belief. He insisted that every man has the right 
to think. 

After the publication of these views every false- 
hood that malignity could coin and malice pass was 
given to the world. On his return to America, after 
the election to the Presidency of another infidel, 
Thomas Jefferson, it was not safe for him to appear 
in the public streets. He was in danger of being 



THOMAS PAINE. 1 13 

mobbed. Under the very flag he had helped to 
put in heaven his rights were not respected. Under 
the Constitution that he had suggested, his life was 
insecure. He had helped to give liberty to more 
than three millions of his fellow-citizens, and they 
were willing to deny it unto him. He was deserted, 
ostracized, shunned, maligned, and cursed. He en- 
joyed the seclusion of a leper ; but he maintained 
through it all his integrity. He stood by the con- 
victions of his mind. Never for one moment did he 
hesitate or waver. 

He died almost alone. The moment he died 
Christians commenced manufacturing horrors for 
his death-bed. They had his chamber filled with 
devils rattling chains, and these ancient falsehoods 
are perpetually certified to by the respectable Chris- 
tians of the present day. The truth is, he died as he 
had lived. Some ministers were impolite enough to 
visit him against his will. Several of them he 
ordered from his room. A couple of Catholic priests, 
in all the meekness of hypocrisy, called, that they 
might enjoy the agonies of a dying friend of man. 
Thomas Paine, rising in his bed, the few embers 
of expiring life blown into flame by the breath of 



I 14 THOMAS PAINE. 

indignation, had the goodness to curse them both. 
His physician, who seems to have been a med- 
dling fool, just as the cold hand was touching the 
patriot's heart, whispered in the dull ear of the 
dying patriot: " Do you believe, or do you wish 
to believe, that Jesus Christ is the son of God?" 
And the reply was : " I have no wish to believe 
on that subject." 

These were the last remembered words of Thomas 
Paine. He died as serenely as ever mortal passed 
away. He died in the full possession of his mind, 
and on the very brink and edge of death, proclaimed 
the doctrines of his life. 

Every Christian, every philanthropist, every be- 
liever in human liberty, should feel under obligation 
to Thomas Paine for the splendid service rendered 
by him in the darkest days of the American Revolu- 
tion. In the midnight of Valley Forge, "The Crisis" 
was the first star that glittered in the wide horizon 
of despair. Every good man should remember with 
gratitude the brave words spoken by Thomas Paine 
in the French Convention against the death of Louis. 
He said : " We will kill the king, not the man. We 
will destroy monarchy, not the monarch." 



THOMAS PAINE. 1 1 5 

Thomas Paine was a champion, in both hemis- 
pheres, of human liberty ; one of the founders and 
fathers of this Republic ; one of the foremost men of 
his age. He never wrote a word in favor of injustice. 
He was a despiser of slavery. He abhorred tyranny 
in every form. He was, in the widest and best sense, 
a friend of all his race. His head was as clear as 
his heart was good, and he had the courage to 
speak his honest thought. 

He was the first man to write these words : " The 
United States of America." He proposed the present 
Federal Constitution, and furnished every thought 
that now glitters in the Declaration of Independence. 

Thomas Paine was one of the intellectual heroes 
— one of the men to whom we are indebted. His 
name is associated forever with the Great Republic. 
As long as free government exists he will be re- 
membered, admired and honored. 

He lived a long, laborious and useful life. The 
world is better for his having lived. For the sake 
of truth he accepted hatred and reproach for his 
portion. He ate the bitter bread of sorrow. His 
friends were untrue to him because he was true to 
himself, and true to them. He lost the respect of 



Il6 THOMAS PAINE. 

what is called society, but kept his own. His life is 
what the world calls failure and what history calls 
success. 

If to love your fellow-men more than self is 
goodness, Thomas Paine was good. If to be in 
advance of your time — to be a pioneer in the direc- 
tion of right — is greatness, Thomas Paine was 
great. If to avow your principles and discharge 
your duty in the presence of death is heroic, Thomas 
Paine was a hero. 

At the age of seventy-three, death touched his 
tired heart. He died in the land his genius defended 
— under the flag he gave to the skies. Slander can- 
not touch him now — hatred cannot reach him more. 
He sleeps in the sanctuary of the tomb, beneath the 
quiet of the stars. 



THE AGE OF FAITH. 




,OR a thousand years faith reigned, with 
scarcely a rebellious subject. Her tem- 
ples were " carpeted with knees," and 
the wealth of nations adorned her count- 
less shrines. The great painters prosti- 
tuted their genius to immortalize her 
vagaries, while the poets enshrined them in song. 
At her bidding, man covered the earth with blood. 
The scales of Justice were turned with her gold, and 
for her use were invented all the cunning instruments 
of pain. She built cathedrals for God, and dungeons 
for men. She peopled the clouds with angels and the 
earth with slaves. The veil between heaven and 
earth was always rent or lifted. The shadows of 
this world, the radiance of heaven, and the glare 
of hell mixed and mingled until man became un- 
certain as to which country he really inhabited. Man 



Il8 THE AGE OF FAITH. 

dwelt in an unreal world. He mistook his ideas, his 
dreams, for real things. His fears became terrible 
and malicious monsters. He lived in the midst of 
furies and fairies, nymphs and naiads, goblins and 
ghosts, witches and wizards, sprites and spooks, 
deities and devils. The obscure and gloomy depths 
were filled with claw and wing — with beak and 
hoof, with leering looks and sneering mouths, with 
the malice of deformity, with the cunning of hatred, 
and with all the slimy forms that fear can draw and 
paint upon the shadowy canvas of the dark. 

It is enough to make one almost insane with pity 
to think what man in the long night has suffered ; of 
the tortures he has endured, surrounded, as he sup- 
posed, by malignant powers, and clutched by the fierce 
phantoms of the air. No wonder that he fell upon his 
trembling knees — that he built altars and reddened 
them even with his own blood. No wonder that he 
implored ignorant priests and impudent magicians for 
aid. No wonder that he crawled groveling in the 
dust to the temple's door, and there, in the insanity 
of despair, besought the deaf gods to hear his bitter 
cry of agony and fear. 



ORIGIN OF RELIGION. 




"AN, in his ignorance, supposed that 
all phenomena were produced by some 
intelligent powers, and with direct ref- 
erence to him. To preserve friendly 
relations with these powers was, and 
still is, the object of all religions. 
Man knelt through fear and to implore assistance, or 
through gratitude for some favor which he supposed 
had been rendered. He endeavored by supplication 
to appease some being who, for some reason, had, as 
he believed, become enraged. The lightning and 
thunder terrified him. In the presence of the volcano 
he sank upon his knees. The great forests filled 
with wild and ferocious beasts, the monstrous ser- 
pents crawling in mysterious depths, the boundless 
sea, the flaming comets, the sinister eclipses, the 
awful calmness of the stars, and, more than all, the 



120 ORIGIN OF RELIGION. 

perpetual presence of death, convinced him that he 
was the sport and prey of unseen and malignant 
powers. The strange and frightful diseases to which 
he was subject, the freezings and burnings of fever, 
the contortions of epilepsy, the sudden palsies, the 
darkness of night, and the wild, terrible and fantastic 
dreams that filled his brain, satisfied him that he 
was haunted and pursued by countless spirits of evil. 
For some reason he supposed that these spirits 
differed in power — that they were not all alike malevo- 
lent — that the higher controlled the lower, and that 
his very existence depended upon gaining the as- 
sistance of the more powerful. For this purpose 
he resorted to prayer, to flattery, to worship and 
to sacrifice. 

To pacify these spirits was considered of infinite 
importance. The poor barbarian, knowing that men 
could be softened by gifts, gave to these spirits that 
which to him seemed of the most value. With 
bursting heart he would offer the blood of his dearest 
child. It was impossible for him to conceive of a god 
utterly unlike himself, and he naturally supposed that 
these powers of the air would be affected a little at 
the sight of so great and so deep a sorrow. It was 



ORIGIN OF RELIGION. 121 

with the barbarian then as with the civilized now — 
one class lived upon and made merchandise of the 
fears of another. Certain persons took it upon them- 
selves to appease the gods, and to instruct the people 
in their duties to these unseen powers. This was 
the origin of the priesthood. The priest pretended 
to stand between the wrath of the gods and the help- 
lessness of man. He was man's attorney at the court 
of heaven. He carried to the invisible world a flag 
of truce, a protest and a request. He came back 
with a command, with authority and with power. 
Man fell upon his knees before his own servant, and 
the priest, taking advantage of the awe inspired by 
his supposed influence with the gods, made of his 
fellow-man a cringing hypocrite and slave. 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 




EDDEN your hands with human blood ; 
blast by slander the fair fame of the inno- 
cent ; strangle the smiling child upon its 
mother's knees ; deceive, ruin and desert 
the beautiful girl who loves and trusts 
you, and your case is not hopeless. For 
all this, and for all these, you may be forgiven. For all 
this, and for all these, that bankrupt court established 
by the gospel, will give you a discharge ; but deny 
the existence of these divine ghosts, of these gods, and 
the sweet and tearful face of Mercy becomes livid with 
eternal hate. Heaven's golden gates are shut, and 
you, with an infinite curse ringing in your ears, with 
the brand of infamy upon your brow, commence 
your endless wanderings in the lurid gloom of hell — 
an immortal vagrant, an eternal outcast, a deathless 
convict. 



THE OLIVE BRANCH, 

1877. 




E have fought and hated enough. Our 
country is prostrate. Labor is in rags. 
Energy has empty hands. The wheels 
of the factory are still. In the safe of 
prudence, money lies locked by the key 
of fear. Confidence is what we need — 
confidence in each other; confidence in our institu- 
tions, in our form of government, in the great future ; 
confidence in law, confidence in liberty, in progress, 
and in the grand destiny of the great Republic. 

I extend to you each and all the olive branch of 
peace. Fellow citizens of the South, I beseech you 
to take it. By the memory of those who died for 
naught ; by the charred remains of your remembered 
homes ; by the ashes of your statesmen dead ; for the 
sake of your sons and your daughters and their fair 
children yet to be, I implore you to take it, with 



124 THE OLIVE BRANCH. 

loving and with loyal hands. It will cultivate your 
wasted fields. It will rebuild your towns and cities. 
It will fill your coffers with gold. It will educate 
your children. It will swell the sails of your com- 
merce. It will cause the roses of joy to clamber and 
climb over the broken cannon of war. It will flood 
the cabins of the freedmen with light, and clothe the 
weak in more than coat of mail, and wrap the poor 
and lowly " in measureless content." 

Take it ! The North will forgive if the South will 
forget. Take it ! The negro will wipe from the tablet 
of memory the strokes and scars of two hundred 
years, and blur with happy tears the record of his 
wrongs ! Take it ! It will unite our Nation ; it 
will make us brothers once again. Take it ! and 
justice will sit in your courts under the outspread 
wings of peace. Take it ! and the brain and lips of 
the future will be free. Take it ! It will bud and 
blossom in your hands and fill your land with 
fragrance and with joy. 






FREE WILL. 




T is insisted that man is free, and is re- 
sponsible, because he knows right from 
wrong. But the compass does not navi- 
gate the ship ; neither does it in any way, 
of itself, determine the direction that is 
taken. When winds and waves are too 
powerful, the compass is of no importance. The 
pilot may read it correctly, and may know the direc- 
tion the ship ought to take, but the compass is not a 
force. So men, blown by the tempests of passion, 
may have the intellectual conviction that they should 
go another way ; but of what use, of what force, 
is the conviction ? 

Thousands of persons have gathered curious statis- 
tics for the purpose of showing that man is absolutely 
dominated by his surroundings. By these statistics 



126 FREEWILL. 

is discovered what is called " the law of average." 
They show that there are about so many suicides in 
London every year, so many letters misdirected at 
Paris, so many men uniting themselves in marriage 
with women older than themselves in Belgium, so 
many burglaries to one murder in France, or so many 
persons driven insane by religion in the United 
States. It is asserted that these facts conclusively 
show that man is acted upon ; that, behind each 
thought, each dream, is the efficient cause, and that 
the doctrine of moral responsibility has been de- 
stroyed by statistics. 

But, does the fact that about so many crimes are 
committed on the average, in a given population, or 
that so many anythings are done, prove that there is 
no freedom in human action ? 

Suppose a population of ten thousand persons ; 
and suppose, further, that they are free, and that they 
have the usual wants of mankind. Is it not reason- 
able to say that they would act in some way ? They 
certainly would take measures to obtain food, clothing, 
and shelter. If these people differed in intellect, in 
surroundings, in temperament, in strength, it is reason- 
able to suppose that all would not be equally sue- 



FREE WILL. 127 

cessful. Under such circumstances, may we not 
safely infer that, in a little while, if the statistics were 
properly taken, a law of average would appear ? In 
other words, free people would act ; and, being differ- 
ent in mind, body, and circumstances, would not all 
act exactly alike. All would not be alike acted upon. 
The deviations from what might be thought wise, or 
right, would sustain such a relation to time and 
numbers that they could be expressed by a law of 
average. If this is true, the law of average does not 
establish necessity. 

But, in my supposed case, the people, after all, are 
not free. They have wants. They are under the 
necessity of feeding, clothing, and sheltering them- 
selves. To the extent of their actual wants, they are 
not free. 

Every limitation is a master. Every finite being 
is a prisoner, and no man has ever yet looked above 
or beyond the prison walls. Our highest conception 
of liberty is to be free from the dictation of fellow 
prisoners. 

To the extent that we have wants, we are not 
free. To the extent that we do not have wants, we do 
not act. 



128 FREE WILL. 

If we are responsible for our thoughts, we ought 
not only to know how they are formed, but we ought 
to form them. If we are the masters of our own 
minds we would be able to tell what we are going to 
think at any future time. 

Evidently, the food of thought — its very warp 
and woof — is furnished through the medium of the 
senses. If we open our eyes, we cannot help seeing. 
If we do not stop our ears, we cannot help hearing. 
If any thing touches us, we feel it. The heart beats 
in spite of us. The lungs supply themselves with 
air without our knowledge. The blood pursues its 
old accustomed rounds, and all our senses act without 
our leave. As the heart beats, so the brain thinks. 
The will is not its king. As the blood flows, as the 
lungs expand, as the eyes see, as the ears hear, so 
the brain thinks. 

I had a dream, in which I debated a question 
with a friend. I thought to myself : " This is a 
dream, and yet I can not tell what my opponent 
is going to say. Yet, if it is a dream, I am doing the 
thinking for both sides, and, therefore, ought to 
know in advance what my friend will urge." But, in 
a dream, there is some one who seems to talk to us. 



FREE WILL. I29 

Our own brain tells us news, and presents an unex- 
pected thought. 

Is it not possible that each brain is a field, where 
all the senses sow the seeds of thought ? Some of 
these fields are mostly barren, poor, and hard, pro- 
ducing only worthless weeds ; and some grow sturdy 
oaks and stately palms ; and some are like the tropic 
world, where plants and trees and vines seem^toyal 
children of the soil and sun. 



THE KING OF DEATH. 




OW is it known that it was claimed, during 
the life of Christ, that he had wrought a 
miracle ? And if the claim was made, 
how is it known that it was not denied ? 
Did the Jews believe that Christ was 
clothed with miraculous power ? Would 
they have dared to crucify a man who had the power 
to thrill the dead with life ? Is it not wonderful that 
no one at the trial of Christ said one word about the 
miracles he had wrought? Nothing about the sick 
that he had healed, or the dead that he had raised ? If 
Christ had wrought the miracles attributed to him ; 
if he had cured the maimed, the leprous, and the halt ; 
if he had changed the night of blindness into blessed 
day ; if he had wrested from the fleshless hand of 
avaricious death the stolen jewel of a life, and clothed 
again with throbbing flesh the pulseless dust, he would 
have won the love and adoration of mankind. If ever 
there shall stand upon this earth the king of death, all 
human knees will touch the ground. 




THE WISE MAN. 

\ 

HE wise man relies upon evidence, upon 
demonstration, upon experience, and 
occupies himself with one world at a 
time. He perceives that there is a men- 
tal horizon that we cannot pierce, and 
that beyond that is the unknown — 
possibly the unknowable. He endeavors to examine 
only that which is capable of being examined, and 
considers the theological method as not only useless, 
but hurtful. After all, God is but a guess, throned 
and established by arrogance and assertion. Turning 
his attention to those things that have in some way 
affected the condition of mankind, the wise man 
leaves the unknowable to priests and to the believers 
in the " moral government " of the world. He sees 
only natural causes and natural results, and seeks to 
induce man to give up gazing into void and empty 
space, that he may give his entire attention to the 



132 THE WISE MAN. 

world in which he lives. He sees that right and 
wrong do not depend upon the arbitrary will of even 
an infinite being, but upon the nature of things; 
that they are relations, not entities, and that they 
cannot exist, so far as we know, apart from human 
experience. 

It may be that men will finally see that selfishness 
and self-sacrifice are both mistakes ; that the first 
devours itself ; that the second is not demanded by 
the good, and that the bad are unworthy of it. It may 
be that our race has never been, and never will 
be, deserving of a martyr. Some time we may see 
that justice is the highest possible form of mercy and 
love, and that all should not only be allowed, but 
compelled, to reap exactly what they sow ; that in- 
dustry should not support idleness, and that they 
who waste the spring, and summer, and autumn of 
their lives, should bear the winter when it comes. 
The fortunate should assist the victims of accident ; 
the strong should defend the weak, and the intel- 
lectual should lead, with loving hands, the mental 
poor; but Justice should remove the bandage from 
her eyes long enough to distinguish between the 
vicious and the unfortunate. 



BRUNO. 




HE night of the middle ages lasted for a 
thousand years. The first star that 
enriched the horizon of this universal 
gloom was Giordano Bruno. He was 
the herald of the dawn. 

He was born in 1550, was educated 
for a priest, became a Dominican friar. At last his 
reason revolted against the doctrine of transubstanti- 
ation. He could not believe that the entire Trinity- 
was in a wafer, or in a swallow of wine. He could 
not believe that a man could devour the Creator of 
the universe by eating a piece of bread. This led 
him to investigate other dogmas of the Catholic 
church, and in every direction he found the same 
contradictions and impossibilities supported, not by 
reason, but by faith. 

Those who loved their enemies threatened his life. 
He was obliged to flee from his native land, and he 



134 BRUNO. 

became a vagabond in nearly every nation of Europe. 
He declared that he fought, not what priests believed, 
but what they pretended to believe. He was driven 
from his native country because of his astronomical 
opinions. He had lost confidence in the bible as a 
scientific work. He was in danger because he had 
discovered a truth. 

He fled to England. He gave some lectures at 
Oxford. He found that institution controlled by the 
priests. He found that they were teaching nothing 
of importance — only the impossible and the hurtful. 
He called Oxford " the widow of true learning." 
There were in England, at that time, two men who 
knew more than the rest of the world. Shakespeare 
was then alive. 

Bruno was driven from England. He was re- 
garded as a dangerous man, — he had opinions, he 
inquired after reasons, he expressed confidence in facts. 
He fled to France. He was not allowed to remain 
in that country. He discussed things— that was 
enough. The Church said, a move on." He went 
to Germany. He was not a believer — he was an 
investigator. The Germans wanted believers; they 
regarded the whole Christian system as settled ; they 



BRUNO. 135 

wanted witnesses ; they wanted men who would 
assert. So he was driven from Germany. 

He returned at last to his native land. He found 
himself without friends, because he had been true, not 
only to himself, but to the human race. But the 
world was false to him because he refused to crucify 
the Christ of his own soul between the two thieves of 
hypocrisy and bigotry. He was arrested for teaching 
that there are other worlds than this ; that many of the 
stars are suns, around which other worlds revolve ; 
that Nature did not exhaust all her energies on this 
grain of sand called the earth. He believed in a 
plurality of worlds, in the rotation of this, in the 
heliocentric theory. For these crimes, and for these 
alone, he was imprisoned for six years. He was 
kept in solitary confinement. He was allowed no 
books, no friends, no visitors. He was denied pen 
and paper. In the darkness, in the loneliness, he had 
time to examine the great questions of origin, of 
existence, of destiny. He put to the test what is 
called the goodness of God. He found that he could 
neither depend upon man nor upon any deity. At last, 
the inquisition demanded him. He was tried, con- 
demned, excommunicated and sentenced to be burned. 



I36 BRUNO. 

According to Professor Draper, he believed that 
this world is animated by an intelligent soul — the 
cause of forms, but not of matter ; that it lives in all 
things, even in such as seem not to live ; that every- 
thing is ready to become organized ; that matter is 
the mother of forms, and then their grave ; that matter 
and the soul of things, together, constitute God. He 
was a pantheist — that is to say, an atheist. He was 
a lover of nature, — a reaction from the asceticism 
of the church. He was tired of the gloom of the 
monastery. He loved the fields, the woods, the 
streams. He said to his brother-priests : Come out 
of your cells, out of your dungeons ; come into the air 
and light. Throw away your beads and your crosses. 
Gather flowers ; mingle with your fellow-men ; have 
wives and children; scatter the seeds of joy ; throw 
away the thorns and nettles of your creeds ; enjoy the 
perpetual miracle of Life. 

On the sixteenth day of February, in the year 
of grace 1600, by the triumphant beast, the Church 
of Rome, this philosopher, this great and splendid 
man, was burned. He was offered his liberty if he 
would recant. There was no God to be offended 
by his recantation, and yet, as an apostle of what he 



BRUNO. 137 

believed to be the truth, he refused this offer. To 
those who passed the sentence upon him he said : 
" It is with greater fear that ye pass this sentence 
upon me than I receive it." This man, greater than 
any naturalist of his day ; grander than the martyr 
of any religion, died willingly in defence of what 
he believed to be the sacred truth. He was great 
enough to know that real religion will not destroy 
the joy of life on earth ; great enough to know that 
investigation is not a crime — that the really useful is 
not hidden in the mysteries of faith. He knew that 
the Jewish records were below the level of the Greek 
and Roman myths ; that there is no such thing 
as special providence ; that prayer is useless ; that 
liberty and necessity are the same, and that good and 
evil are but relative. 

He was the first real martyr, — neither frightened 
by perdition, nor bribed by heaven. He was the 
first of all the world who died for truth without ex- 
pectation of reward. He did not anticipate a crown 
of glory. His imagination had not peopled the 
heavens with angels waiting for his soul. He had 
not been promised an eternity of joy if he stood firm, 
nor had he been threatened with the fires of hell if he 



I38 BRUNO. 

wavered and recanted. He expected as his reward 
an eternal nothing ! Death was to him an everlasting 
end — nothing beyond but a sleep without a dream, a 
night without a star, without a dawn — nothing but 
extinction, blank, utter, and eternal. No crown, no 
palm, no "well done, good and faithful servant," no 
shout of welcome, .10 s^ ig of praise, no smile of God, 
no kiss of Christ, no mansion in the fair skies — not 
even a grave within the earth — nothing but ashes, 
wind-blown and priest-scattered, mixed with earth 
and trampled beneath the feet of men and beasts. 

The murder of this man will never be completely 
and perfectly avenged until from Rome shall be 
swept every vestige of priest and pope, until over 
the shapeless ruin of St. Peter's, the crumbled Vati- 
can and the fallen cross, shall rise a monument 
to Bruno, — the thinker, philosopher, philanthropist, 
atheist, martyr. 



THE REAL BIBLE. 




HE world shoulcu know that the real 
bible has not yet been written, but 
is being written, and that it will never 
be finished until the race begins its 
downward march, or ceases to exist. 
The real bible is not the work of 
inspired men, nor of prophets, or apostles, or evan- 
gelists, nor of Christs. Every man who finds a fact, 
adds a word to this great book. The real bible is 
not attested by prophecy, by miracles, or signs. 
It makes no appeal to faith, to ignorance, to credulity, 
or fear. It has no punishment for unbelief, and 
no reward for hypocrisy. It appeals to man in 
the name of demonstration. It has nothing to con- 
ceal. It has no fear of being read, of being contra- 
dicted, of being investigated and understood. It 
does not pretend to be holy, or sacred ; it simply 



14° THE REAL BIBLE. 

claims to be true. It challenges the scrutiny of all, 
and implores every reader to verify every line for 
himself. It is incapable of being blasphemed. This 
book appeals to all the surroundings of man. Each 
thing that exists testifies to its perfection. The earth, 
with its heart of fire and crowns of snow ; with 
its forests and plains, its rocks and seas ; with its 
every wave and cloud ; with its every leaf and bud 
and flower, confirms its every word ; and the solemn 
stars, shining in the infinite abysses, are the eternal 
witnesses of its truth. 



BENEDICT SPINOZA. 




NE of the greatest thinkers was Benedict 
Spinoza, a Jew, born at Amsterdam in 
1632. He studied medicine and after- 
ward theology. He endeavored to under- 
stand what he studied. In theology he 
necessarily failed. Theology is not in- 
tended to be understood, — it is only to be believed. 
It is an act, not of reason, but of faith. Spinoza put to 
the rabbis so many questions, and so persistently 
asked for reasons, that he became the most trouble- 
some of students. When the rabbis found it im- 
possible to answer the questions, they concluded to 
silence the questioner. He was tried, found guilty, 
and excommunicated from the synagogue. 

By the terrible curse of the Jewish religion, he 
was made an outcast from every Jewish home. His 
father could not give him shelter. His mother could 



142 BENEDICT SPINOZA. 

not give him bread — could not speak to him, without 
becoming an outcast herself. All the cruelty of 
Jehovah, all the infamy of the Old Testament, was in 
this curse. In the darkness of the synagogue the 
rabbis lighted their torches, and while pronouncing 
the curse, extinguished them in blood, imploring God 
that in like manner the soul of Benedict Spinoza 
might be extinguished. 

Spinoza was but twenty-four years old when he 
found himself without kindred, without friends, sur- 
rounded only by enemies. He uttered no complaint. 
He earned his bread with willing hands, and cheerfully 
divided his crust with those still poorer than himself. 

He tried to solve the problem of existence. To 
him, the universe was One. The Infinite embraced 
the All. The All was God. According to his belief, 
the universe did not commence to be. It is ; from 
eternity it was ; to eternity it will be. 

He was right. The universe is all there is, or 
was, or will be. It is both subject and object, 
contemplator and contemplated, creator and created, 
destroyer and destroyed, preserver and preserved, and 
hath within itself all causes, modes, motions and effects. 

In this there is hope. This is a foundation and a 



BENEDICT SPINOZA. 143 

star. The Infinite is the All. Without the All, the 
Infinite cannot be. I am something. Without me, 
the Infinite cannot exist. 

Spinoza was a naturalist — that is to say, a pan- 
theist. He took the ground that the supernatural is, 
and forever will be, an infinite impossibility. His 
propositions are luminous as stars, and each of his 
demonstrations is a Gibraltar, behind which logic sits 
and smiles at all the sophistries of superstition. 

Spinoza has been hated because he has not been 
answered. He was a real republican. He regarded 
the people as the true and only source of political 
power. He put the state above the church, the people 
above the priest. He believed in the absolute liberty 
of worship, thought and speech. In every relation of 
life he was just, true, gentle, patient, modest and 
loving. He respected the rights of others, and en- 
deavored to enjoy his own, and yet he brought upon 
himself the hatred of the Jewish and the Christian 
world. In his day, logic was blasphemy, and to think 
was the unpardonable sin. The priest hated the phi- 
losopher, revelation reviled reason, and faith was the 
sworn foe of every fact. 

Spinoza was a philosopher, a philanthropist. He 



144 BENEDICT SPINOZA. 

lived in a world of his own. He avoided men. His 
life was an intellectual solitude. He was a mental 
hermit. Only in his own brain he found the liberty 
he loved. And yet the rabbis and the priests, the 
ignorant zealot and the cruel bigot, feeling that this 
quiet, thoughtful, modest man was in some way 
forging weapons to be used against the church, hated 
him with all their hearts. 

He did not retaliate. He found excuses for their 
acts. Their ignorance, their malice, their misguided 
and revengeful zeal excited only pity in his breast. 
He injured no man. He did not live on alms. He 
was poor — and yet, with the wealth of his brain, he 
enriched the world. 

On Sunday, February 21st, 1677, Spinoza, one of 
the greatest and subtlest of metaphysicians — one of 
the noblest and purest of human beings, — at the age 
of forty-four, passed tranquilly away ; and notwith- 
standing the curse of the synagogue under which he 
had lived and most lovingly labored, death left upon 
his lips the smile of perfect peace. 




THE FIRST DOUBT. 
</^j£ 

HE first doubt was the womb and cradle 
of progress, and from the first doubt, 
man has continued to advance. Men 
began to investigate, and the church 
began to oppose. The astronomer 
scanned the heavens, while the church 
branded his grand forehead with the word, " Infidel ;" 
and now, not a glittering star in all the vast expanse 
bears a Christian name. In spite of all religion, the 
geologist penetrated the earth, read her history in 
books of stone, and found, hidden within her bosom, 
souvenirs of all the ages. Old ideas perished in the 
retort of the chemist* and useful truths took their 
places. One by one religious conceptions have been 
placed in the crucible of science, and thus far, nothing 
but dross has been found. A new world has been 
discovered by the microscope ; everywhere has been 



146 THE FIRST DOUBT. 

found the infinite ; in every direction man has investi- 
gated and explored, and nowhere, in earth or stars, 
has been found the footstep of any being superior to 
or independent of nature. Nowhere has been dis- 
covered the slightest evidence of any interference from 
without. 

These are the sublime truths that enabled man to 
throw off the yoke of superstition. These are the 
splendid facts that snatched the sceptre of authority 
from the hands of priests. 



THE INFINITE HORROR. 




F there be another life, the basest soul that 
finds its way to that dark or radiant shore 
will have the everlasting chance of doing 
right. Nothing but the most cruel ignor- 
ance, the most heartless superstition, the 
most ignorant theology, ever imagined 
that the few days of human life spent here, surrounded 
by mists and clouds of darkness, blown over life's sea 
by storms and tempests of passion, fixed for all 
eternity the condition of the human race. If this 
doctrine be true, this life is but a net, in which 
Jehovah catches souls for hell. 

The idea that a certain belief is necessary to 
salvation unsheathed the swords and lighted the 
fagots of persecution. As long as heaven is the re- 
ward of creed instead of deed, just so long will every 
orthodox church be a bastile, every member a 
prisoner, and every priest a turnkey. 



148 THE INFINITE HORROR. 

In the estimation of good orthodox Christians, I 
am a criminal, because I am trying to take from 
loving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, 
wives, and lovers the consolations naturally arising 
from a belief in an eternity of grief and pain. I want 
to tear, break, and scatter to the winds the God that 
priests erected in the fields of innocent pleasure — a 
God made of sticks, called creeds, and of old clothes, 
called myths. I have tried to take from the coffin 
its horror, from the cradle its curse, and put out the 
fires of revenge kindled by the savages of the past. 
Is it necessary that heaven should borrow its light 
from the glare of hell ? Infinite punishment is infinite 
cruelty, endless injustice, immortal meanness. To 
worship an eternal gaoler hardens, debases, and 
pollutes the soul. While there is one sad and break- 
ing heart in the universe, no perfectly good being 
can be perfectly happy. Against the heartlessness 
of this doctrine every grand and generous soul should 
enter its solemn protest. I want no part in any 
heaven where the saved, the ransomed, and redeemed 
drown with merry shouts the cries and sobs of hell ; 
in which happiness forgets misery ; where the tears 
of the lost increase laughter and deepen the dimples 



THE INFINITE HORROR. I49 

of joy. The idea of hell was born of ignorance, 
brutality, fear, cowardice, and revenge. This idea 
tends to show that our remote ancestors were the 
lowest beasts. Only from dens, lairs, and caves ; 
only from mouths filled with cruel fangs ; only from 
hearts of fear and hatred ; only from the conscience 
of hunger and lust ; only from the lowest and most 
debased, could come this most cruel, heartless, and 
absurd of all dogmas. 

Our ancestors knew but little of nature. They 
were too astonished to investigate. They could 
not divest themselves of the idea that everything 
happened with reference to them ; that they caused 
storms and earthquakes ; that they brought the 
tempest and the whirlwind ; that on account of some- 
thing they had done, or omitted to do, the lightning 
of vengeance leaped from the darkened sky. They 
made up their minds that at least two vast and 
powerful beings presided over this world ; that one 
was good and the other bad ; that both of these 
beings wished to get control of the souls of men ; 
that they were relentless enemies, eternal foes ; that 
both welcomed recruits and hated deserters ; that one 
offered rewards in this world, and the other in the 



150 THE INFINITE HORROR. 

next. Man saw cruelty and mercy in nature, because 
he imagined that phenomena were produced to punish 
or to reward him. It was supposed that God de- 
manded worship ; that he loved to be flattered ; that 
he delighted in sacrifice ; that nothing made him 
happier than to see ignorant faith upon its knees ; 
that above all things he hated and despised doubters 
and heretics, and regarded investigation as rebellion. 
Each community felt it a duty to see that the enemies 
of God were converted or killed. To allow a heretic 
to live in peace was to invite the wrath of God. 
Every public evil, every misfortune, was accounted 
for by something the community had permitted or 
done. When epidemics appeared, brought by ignor- 
ance and welcomed by filth, the heretic was brought 
out and sacrificed to appease the anger of God. By 
putting intention behind what man called good, God 
was produced. By putting intention behind what 
man called bad, the Devil was created. Leave this 
u intention " out, and gods and devils fade away. If 
not a human being existed, the sun would continue 
to shine, and tempest now and then would devastate 
the earth; the rain would fall in pleasant showers; 
violets would spread their velvet bosoms to the sun, 



THE INFINITE HORROR. 151 

the earthquake would devour, birds would sing and 
daisies bloom and roses blush, and volcanoes fill the 
heavens with their lurid glare ; the procession of the 
seasons would not be broken, and the stars would 
shine as serenely as though the world were filled 
with loving hearts and happy homes. 

Do not imagine that the doctrine of eternal re- 
venge belongs to Christianity alone. Nearly all 
religions have had this dogma for a corner-stone. 
Upon this burning foundation nearly all have built. 
Over the abyss of pain rose the glittering dome of 
pleasure. This world was regarded as one of trial. 
Here, a God of infinite wisdom experimented with 
man. Between the outstretched paws of the infinite, 
the mouse, man, was allowed to play. Here, man 
had the opportunity of hearing priests and kneeling 
in temples. Here, he could read, and hear read, the 
sacred books. Here, he could have the example of 
the pious and the counsels of the holy. Here, he 
could build churches and cathedrals. Here, he could 
burn incense, fast, wear hair-cloth, deny himself all 
the pleasures of life, confess to priests, construct in- 
struments of torture, bow before pictures and images, 
and persecute all who had the courage to despise 



152 THE INFINITE HORROR. 

superstition, and the goodness to tell their honest 
thoughts. After death, if he died out of the church, 
nothing could be done to make him better. When 
he should come into the presence of God, nothing 
was left except to damn him. Priests might convert 
him here, but God could do nothing there. All of 
which shows how much more a priest can do for a 
soul than its creator. Only here, on the earth, where 
the devil is constantly active, only where his agents 
attack every .iere the slightest hope of moral 

improvemev mge ! that a world cursed by God, 

filled with tc ptations, and thick with fiends, should 
be the only place where man can repent, the only 
place where reform is possible. 

Masters frightened slaves with the threat of hell, 
and slaves got a kind of shadowy revenge by whis- 
pering back the threat. The imprisoned imagined a 
hell for their gaolers ; the weak built this place for 
the strong; the arrogant for their rivals; the van- 
quished for their victors ; the priest for the thinker ; 
religion for reason ; superstition for science. All the 
meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all 
the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which 
the heart of man is capable, grew, blossomed, and 
bore fruit in this one word — Hell. 



NATURE. 




ATURE, so far as we can discern, without 
passion and without intention, forms, 
transforms, and Ketr^nsforms forever. 
She neither weeps 2 ioices. She 

produces man withotu ± ;e, and ob- 

literates him without regre " She knows 
no distinction between the beneficial and the hurtful. 
Poison and nutrition, pain and joy, life and death, 
smiles and tears are alike to her. She is neither 
merciful nor cruel. She cannot be flattered by wor- 
ship nor melted by tears. She does not know even 
the attitude of prayer. She appreciates no difference 
between poison in the fangs of snakes and mercy in 
the hearts of men. Yet religious people see nothing 
but design everywhere, and personal, intelligent inter- 
ference in everything. They insist that the universe 
has been created, and that the adaptation of means to 



154 NATURE. 

ends is perfectly apparent. They point us to the 
sunshine, to the flowers, to the April rain, and to all 
there is of beauty and of use in the world. Did it 
ever occur to them that a cancer is as beautiful in its 
development as is the reddest rose ; that what they 
are pleased to call the adaptation of means to ends, is 
as apparent in the cancer as in the April rain ? How 
beautiful the process of digestion ! By what ingenious 
methods the blood is poisoned so that the cancer shall 
have food ! By what wonderful contrivances the 
entire system of man is made to pay tribute to this 
divine and charming cancer ! See by what admirable 
instrumentalities it feeds itself from the surrounding 
quivering, dainty flesh ! See how it gradually but 
surely expands and grows ! By what marvelous 
mechanism it is supplied with long and slender roots 
that reach out to the most secret nerves of pain for 
sustenance and life ! What beautiful colors it presents ! 
Seen through the microscope it is a miracle of order 
and beauty. All the ingenuity of man cannot stop 
its growth. Think of the amount of thought it must 
have required to invent a way by which the life of one 
man might be given to produce one cancer? Is it 



NATURE. 155 

possible to look upon it and doubt that there is design 
in the universe, and that the inventor of this wonder- 
ful cancer must be infinitely powerful, ingenious and 
good ? 

Man has no ideas, and can have none, except 
those suggested by his surroundings. He cannot 
conceive of anything utterly unlike what he has seen 
or felt. He can exaggerate, diminish, combine, 
separate, deform, beautify, improve, multiply and com- 
pare what he sees, what he feels, what he hears, and 
all of which he takes cognizance through the medium 
of the senses ; but he cannot create. Having seen 
exhibitions of power, he can say, omnipotent. Hav- 
ing lived, he can say, immortality. Knowing some- 
thing of time, he can say, eternity. Conceiving 
something of intelligence, he can say, God. Having 
seen exhibitions of malice, he can say, devil. A few 
gleams of happiness having fallen athwart the gloom 
of his life, he can say, heaven. Pain, in its number- 
less forms, having been experienced, he can say, hell. 
Yet all these ideas have a foundation in fact, and only 
a foundation. The superstructure has been reared by 
exaggerating, diminishing, combining, separating, de- 
forming, beautifying, improving or multiplying reali- 



156 NATURE. 

ties, so that the edifice or fabric is but the incongruous 
grouping of what man has perceived through the 
medium of the senses. It is as though we should 
give to a lion the wings of an eagle, the hoofs of a 
bison, the tail of a horse, the pouch of a kangaroo, 
and the trunk of an elephant. We have in imagina- 
tion created an impossible monster. And yet the 
various parts of this monster really exist. So it is 
with all the gods that man has made. Beyond nature 
man cannot go, even in thought — above nature he 
cannot rise — below nature he cannot fall. 



NIGHT AND MORNING. 




LOOK. In gloomy caves I see the sacred 
serpents coiled, waiting for their sacrificial 
prey. I see their open jaws, their restless 
tongues, their glittering eyes, their cruel 
fangs. I see them seize and crush, in 
many horrid folds, the helpless children 
given by mothers to appease the Serpent-God. 

I look again. I see temples wrought of stone 
and gilded with barbaric gold. I see altars red 
with human blood. I see the solemn priests thrust 
knives in the white breasts of girls. 

I look again. I see other temples and other 
altars, where greedy flames devour the flesh and 
blood of babes. I see other temples and other priests 
and other altars dripping with the blood of oxen, 
lambs, and doves. I see other temples and other 



158 NIGHT AND MORNING. 

priests and other altars, on which are sacrificed the 
liberties of man. I look : I see the cathedrals of 
God, the huts of peasants ; the robes of kings, the 
rags of honest men. 

I see a world at war — the lovers of God are the 
haters of men. I see dungeons filled with the noblest 
and the best. I see exiles, wanderers, outcasts — 
millions of martyrs, widows, and orphans. I see the 
cunning instruments of torture, and hear again the 
shrieks and sobs and moans of millions dead. I see 
the prison's gloom, the fagot's flame. I see a world 
beneath the feet of priests ; Liberty in chains ; every 
virtue a crime, every crime a virtue ; the white 
forehead of honor wearing the brand of shame ; intel- 
ligence despised, stupidity sainted, hypocrisy crowned; 
and bending above the poor earth, religion's night 
without a star. This was. 

I look again, and in the East of Hope, the first 
pale light shed by the herald star gives promise of 
another dawn. I look, and from the ashes, blood 
and tears, the countless heroes leap to bless the 
future and avenge the past. I see a world at war, 
and in the storm and chaos of the deadly strife 
thrones crumble, altars fall, chains break, creeds 



NIGHT AND MORNING. 159 

change. The highest peaks are touched with holy 
light. The dawn has blossomed. It is Day. 

I look. I see discoverers sailing mysterious seas. 
I see inventors cunningly enslave the blind forces of 
the world. Schools are built, teachers slowly take the 
place of priests. Philosophers arise. Thinkers give 
the world their wealth of brain, and lips grow rich 
with words of truth. This is. 

I look again. The popes and priests and kings 
are gone. The altars and the thrones have mingled 
with the dust. The aristocracy of land and cloud 
have perished from the earth and air. The gods are 
dead. A new religion sheds its glory on mankind. 
It is the gospel of this world, the religion of the body, 
the evangel of health and joy. I see a world at 
peace, a world where labor reaps its true reward. A 
world without prisons, without workhouses, without 
asylums — a world on which the gibbet's shadow 
does not fall ; a world where the poor girl, trying to 
win bread with the needle — the needle that has been 
called "the asp for the breast of the poor" — is not 
driven to the desperate choice of crime or death, of 
suicide or shame. I see a world without the beg- 
gar's outstretched palm, the miser's heartless, stony 



l6o NIGHT AND MORNING. 

stare, the piteous wail of want, the pallid face of 
crime, the livid lips of lies, the cruel eyes of scorn. 
I see a race without disease of flesh or brain — shapely 
and fair, the married harmony of form and function. 

And as I look, Life lengthens, Joy deepens, Love 
intensifies, Fear dies, — Liberty at last is God, and 
Heaven is here. This shall be. 



THE CONFLICT. 




VERY man who has good health, every 
man with good sense, every one who 
has had his dinner and has enough left 
for supper, is, to that extent, a capitalist. 
Every man with a good character, who 
has the credit to borrow a dollar, or to 
buy a meal, is a capitalist ; and nine out of ten of the 
great capitalists in the United States are simply 
successful working-men. There is no conflict, and 
can be no conflict, in the United States, between 
capital and labor ; and the men who endeavor to 
excite the envy of the unfortunate, and the malice 
of the poor, are the enemies of law and order. 

As a rule, wealth is the result of industry, economy 
and attention to business ; and as a rule, poverty is 
the result of idleness, extravagance, and inattention 
to business, though to these rules there are thousands 



l62 THE CONFLICT. 

of exceptions. The man who has wasted his time, 
who has thrown away his opportunities, is apt to 
envy the man who has not. For instance, there are 
six shoemakers working in one shop. One of them 
attends to his business. You can hear the music of 
his hammer late and early. He is in love with some 
girl on the next street. He has made up his mind to 
be a man ; to succeed ; to make somebody else 
happy ; to have a home ; and while he is working, 
in his imagination he can see his own fireside, with 
the light falling on the faces of wife and child. The 
other five gentlemen work as little as they can, spend 
Sunday in dissipation, have the headache Monday, 
and, as a result, never advance. The industrious 
one, the one in love, gains the confidence of his 
employer, and in a little while he cuts out work for 
the others. The first thing you know he has a shop 
of his own ; the next, a store ; because the man of 
reputation, the man of character, the man of known 
integrity, can buy all he wishes. The next thing 
you know he is married, and he has built him 
a house, and he is happy. His dream has been 
realized. After awhile the same five shoemakers, 
having pursued the old course, stand on the corner 



THE CONFLICT. 1 63 

some Sunday when he rides by. He has a car- 
riage ; his wife sits by his side, her face covered 
with smiles, and they have two children, their eyes 
beaming with joy, and the blue ribbons are flut- 
tering in the wind. Thereupon, these five shoemakers 
adjourn to some neighboring saloon and pass a res- 
olution that there is an irrepressible conflict between 
capital and labor. 



DEATH OF THE AGED. 




FTER all, there is something tenderly 
appropriate in the serene death of the old. 
Nothing is more touching than the death 
of the young, the strong. But when the 
duties of life have all been nobly done ; 
when the sun touches the horizon ; when 
the purple twilight falls upon the past, the present, 
and the future ; when memory, with dim eyes, can 
scarcely spell the blurred and faded records of the 
vanished days — then, surrounded by kindred and by 
friends, death comes like a strain of music. The day 
has been long, the road weary, and the traveler 
gladly stops at the welcome inn. 

Nearly forty-eight years ago, under the snow, in 
the little town of Cazenovia, my poor mother was 
buried. I was but two years old. I remember her 
as she looked in death. That sweet, cold face has 
kept my heart warm through all the changing years. 



THE CHARITY OF EXTRAVAGANCE. 




HENEVER the laboring men are out 
of employment they begin to hate the 
rich. They feel that the dwellers in 
palaces, the riders in carriages, the 
wearers of broadcloth, silk, and velvet 
have in some way been robbing them. 
As a matter of fact, the palace builders are the friends 
of labor. The best form of charity is extravagance. 
When you give a man money, when you toss him a 
dollar, although you get nothing, the man loses his 
manhood. To help others help themselves is the 
only real charity. There is no use in boosting a 
man who is not climbing. Whenever I see a 
splendid home, a palace, a magnificent block, I think 
of the thousands who were fed — of the women and 
children clothed, of the firesides made happy. 

A rich man living up to his privileges, having the 



I 66 EXTRAVAGANCE. 

best house, the best furniture, the best horses, the 
finest grounds, the most beautiful flowers, the best 
clothes, the best food, the best pictures, and all the 
books that he can afford, is a perpetual blessing. 

The prodigality of the rich is the providence of 
the poor. 

The extravagance of wealth makes it possible for 
poverty to save. 

The rich man who lives according to his means, 
who is extravagant in the best and highest sense, is 
not the enemy of labor. The miser, who lives in a 
hovel, wears rags, and hoards his gold, is a perpetual 
curse. He is like one who dams a river at its source. 

The moment hard times come the cry of economy 
is raised. The press, the platform, and the pulpit 
unite in recommending economy to the rich. In 
consequence of this cry, the man of wealth discharges 
servants, sells horses, allows his carriage to become 
a hen-roost, and after taking employment and food 
from as many as he can, congratulates himself that 
he has done his part toward restoring prosperity to 
the country. 

Miserable is that country where the poor are ex- 
travagant and the rich economical. Happy is that 






EXTRAVAGANCE. 167 

land where the poor are economical and the rich 
extravagant. 

I sympathize with every honest effort made by 
the children of labor to improve their condition. 
That is a poorly governed country in which those 
who do the most have the least. There is something 
wrong when men are obliged to beg for leave to toil. 
We are not yet a civilized people ; when we are, 
pauperism and crime will vanish from our land. 

There is one thing, however, of which I am glad 
and proud, and that is, that society is not, in our 
country, petrified ; that the poor are not always poor. 
The children of the poor of this generation may, and 
probably will, be the rich of the next. The sons of 
the rich of this generation may be the poor of the 
next; so that after all, the rich fear and the poor 
hope. 

It is the glory of the United States that the poor 
man can take his boy upon his knee and say, " My 
son, all the avenues to distinction are open to you. 
You can rise. There is no station, no position, to 
which you may not aspire. The poverty of your 
father will not be a millstone about your neck. The 
public schools are open to you. For you there 



I 68 EXTRAVAGANCE. 

are education, honor, fame, and prosperity." These 
thoughts render holy every drop of sweat that rolls 
down the face of honest toil. 

I sympathize with the wanderers ; with the 
vagrants out of employment ; even with the sad and 
weary men who are seeking bread but not work. 
When I see one of these men, poor and friendless — no 
matter how bad he is — I think that somebody loved 
him once ; that he was once held in the arms of a 
mother ; that he slept beneath her loving eyes, and 
wakened in the light of her smile. I see him in the 
cradle, listening to lullabies sung soft and low, and his 
little face is dimpled as though touched by the rosy 
fingers of Joy. And then I think of the strange and 
winding paths, the weary roads he has traveled, from 
that mother's arms to misery and want and aimless 
crime. 



WOMAN. 




OTHING gives me more pleasure, nothing 
gives greater promise for the future, than 
the fact that woman is achieving intellec- 
tual and physical liberty. 

It is refreshing to know that here, in our 
country, there are thousands of women 
who think, and express their thoughts- — who are 
thoroughly free and thoroughly conscientious — who 
have neither been narrowed nor corrupted by a heart- 
less creed — who do not worship a being in heaven 
whom they would shudderingly loathe on earth — 
women who do not stand before the altar of a cruel 
faith, with downcast eyes of timid acquiescence, and 
pay to impudent authority the tribute of a thoughtless 
yes. They are no longer satisfied with being told. 
They examine for themselves. They have ceased to 
be the prisoners of society — the satisfied serfs of hus- 
bands, or the echoes of priests. They demand the 



I70 WOMAN. 

rights that naturally belong to intelligent human 
beings. If wives, they wish to be the equal of hus- 
bands. If mothers, they wish to rear their children 
in the atmosphere of love, liberty and philosophy. 
They believe that woman can discharge all her duties 
without the aid of superstition, and preserve all that 
is true, pure, and tender, without sacrificing in the 
temple of absurdity the convictions of the soul. 

Woman is not the intellectual inferior of man. 
She has lacked, not mind, but opportunity. In the 
long night of barbarism, physical strength and the 
cruelty to use it, were the badges of superiority. 
Muscle was more than mind. In the ignorant age of 
Faith, the loving nature of woman was abused. Her 
conscience was rendered morbid and diseased. It 
might almost be said that she was betrayed by her 
own virtues. At best she secured, not opportunity, 
but flattery — the preface to degradation. She was 
deprived of liberty, and without that, nothing is worth 
the having. She was taught to obey without ques- 
tion, and to believe without thought. There were 
universities for men before the alphabet had been 
taught to women. At the intellectual feast, there 
were no places for wives and mothers. Even now 



M 



WOMAN. 171 

they sit at the second table and eat the crusts and 
crumbs. The schools for women, at the present time, 
are just far enough behind those for men, to fall heirs 
to the discarded ; on the same principle that when a 
doctrine becomes too absurd for the pulpit, it is given 
to the Sunday-school. 

The ages of muscle and miracle — of fists and 
faith — are passing away. Minerva occupies at last a 
higher niche than Hercules. Now, a word is stronger 
than a blow. At last we see women who depend upon 
themselves — who stand, self-poised, the shocks of 
this sad world, without leaning for support against a 
church — who do not go to the literature of barbarism 
for consolation, nor use the falsehoods and mistakes 
of the past for the foundation of their hope — women 
brave enough and tender enough to meet and bear the 
facts and fortunes of this world. 

The men who declare that woman is the intellec- 
tual inferior of man, do not, and cannot, by offering 
themselves in evidence, substantiate their declaration. 

Yet, I must admit that there are thousands of 
wives who still have faith in the saving power of 
superstition — who still insist on attending church 
while husbands prefer the shores, the woods, or the 



172 WOMAN. 

fields. In this way, families are divided. Parents grow 
apart, and unconsciously the pearl of greatest price is 
thrown away. The wife ceases to be the intellectual 
companion of the husband. She reads the "Christian 
Register," sermons in the Monday papers, and a little 
gossip about folks and fashions, while he studies the 
works of Darwin, Haeckel, and Humboldt. Their 
sympathies become estranged. They are no longer 
mental friends. The husband smiles at the follies of 
the wife, and she weeps for the supposed sins of the 
husband. 

The parasite of woman is the priest. 

It must also be admitted that there are thousands 
of men who believe that superstition is good for 
women and children — who regard falsehood as the 
fortress of virtue, and feel indebted to ignorance for 
the purity of daughters and the fidelity of wives. 
These men think of priests as detectives in disguise, 
and regard God as a policeman who prevents elope- 
ments. Their opinions about religion are as correct 
as their estimate of woman. 

Most women cling to the bible because they have 
been taught that to give up that book is to give up 
all hope of another life — of ever meeting again the 



WOMAN. 



173 



loved and lost. They have also been taught that the 
bible is their friend, their defender, and the real civil- 
izer of man. Now if they will only read the bible, 
they will see that the truth or falsity of the dogma of 
inspiration has nothing to do with the question of 
immortality. Certainly the Old Testament does not 
teach us that there is another life, and upon that ques- 
tion even the New is obscure and vague. The 
hunger of the heart finds only a few small and scat- 
tered crumbs. There is nothing definite, solid, and 
satisfying. United with the idea of immortality we 
find the absurdity of the resurrection. A prophecy 
that depends for its fulfillment upon an impossibility 
cannot satisfy the brain or heart. 

There are but few who do not long for a dawn 
beyond the night. And this longing is born of and 
nourished by the heart. Love wrapped in shadow, 
bending with tear-filled eyes above its dead, convul- 
sively clasps the outstretched hand of hope. 

Those who read the " sacred volume" will also 
discover, as they read, that it is not the friend of 
woman. They will find that the writers of that book, 
for the most part, speak of woman as a poor beast of 
burden, a serf, a drudge, a kind of necessary evil — 



174 WOMAN. 

as mere property. Surely, a book that upholds 
polygamy is not the friend of wife and mother. 

Even Christ did not place woman on an equality 
with man. He said not one word about the sacred- 
ness of home, the duties of the husband to the wife — 
nothing calculated to lighten the hearts of those who 
bear the saddest burdens of this life. 

They will also find that the bible has not civilized 
man. A book that establishes and defends slavery 
and wanton war is not calculated to soften the hearts 
of those who believe implicitly that it is the work of 
God. A book that not only permits, but commands, 
religious persecution, has not in my judgment de- 
veloped the affectional nature of man. Its influence 
has been bad and bad only. It has filled the world 
with bitterness, revenge and crime, and retarded in 
countless ways the progress of our race. 

Wives who cease to learn — who simply forget 
and believe — will fill the evening of their lives with 
barren sighs and bitter tears. 

The mind should outlast youth. If when beauty 
fades, thought, the deft and unseen sculptor, hath not 
left his subtle lines upon the face, then all is lost. 
No charm is left. The light is out. There is no 
flame within to glorify the wrinkled clay. 



THE SACRED MYTHS. 




E read the Pagans' sacred books with 
profit and delight. With myth and 
fable we are ever charmed, and find a 
pleasure in the endless repetition of the 
beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, 
in all these records of the past, phi- 
losophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, 
of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the 
mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal 
questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly 
sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror 
that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form 
of Nature's perfect self. 

These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and 
tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored 
by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy 
dawn of birth and death's sad night. They clothed 



I76 THE SACRED MYTHS. 

even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the 
virtues, faults, and frailties of the sons of men. 
In them, the winds and waves were music, and all 
the lakes, and streams, and springs — the mountains, 
woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thou- 
sand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring 
with tremulous desire ; made tawny Summer's bil- 
lowed breast the throne and home of love ; filled 
Autumn's arms with sun-kissed grapes and gathered 
sheaves ; and pictured Winter as a weak old king 
who felt, like Lear, upon his withered face, Cordelia's 
tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and 
have for many ages and in countless ways en- 
riched the heart and kindled thought. But if the 
world were taught that all these things are true 
and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment 
will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, 
the sweetest myth of all the Fable- World would lose* 
its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to 
every brave and thoughtful man. 



INSPIRATION, 




ET us see what inspiration really is. A 
man looks at the sea, and the sea says 
something to him. It makes an impres- 
sion on his mind. It awakens memory ; 
and this impression depends upon his 
experience — upon his intellectual capacity. 
Another looks upon the same sea. He has a different' 
brain ; he has a different experience. The sea may 
speak to him of joy, to the other of grief and tears. 
The sea cannot tell the same thing to any two human 
beings, because no two human beings have had the 
same experience. One may think of wreck and ruin, 
and another, while listening to the " multitudinous 
laughter of the sea," may say : Every drop has visited 
all the shores of earth ; every one has been frozen in 
the vast and icy North, has fallen in snow, has 
whirled in storms around the mountain peaks, been 
kissed to vapor by the sun, worn the seven-hued robe 



178 INSPIRATION. 

of light, fallen in pleasant rain, gurgled from springs, 
and laughed in brooks, while lovers wooed upon the 
banks. Everything in nature tells a different story 
to all eyes that see and to all ears that hear. So, 
when we look upon a painting, a statue, a star, 
or a violet, the more we know, the more we 
have experienced, the more we have thought, the 
more we remember, the more the statue, the star, the 
painting, the violet has to tell. Nature says to me all 
that I am capable of understanding — gives all that 
I can receive. As with star, or flower, or sea, so with 
a book. A thoughtful man reads Shakespeare. 
What does he get ? All that he has the mind to 
understand. Let another read him, who knows 
nothing of the drama, nothing of the impersonations 
of passion, and what does he get ? Almost nothing. 
Shakespeare has a different story for each reader. 
He is a world in which each recognizes his acquaint- 
ances. The impression that nature makes upon the 
mind, the stories told by sea and star and flower, 
must be the natural food of thought. Leaving out 
for the moment the impressions gained from ances- 
tors, the hereditary fears and drifts and trends — the 
natural food of thought must be the impressions 



INSPIRATION. I79 

made upon the brain by coming in contact, through 
the medium of the senses, with what we call the out- 
ward world. The brain is natural ; its food is 
natural ; the result, thought, must be natural. Of the 
supernatural we have no conception. Thought may 
be deformed, and the thought of one may be strange 
to, and denominated unnatural by, another ; but it 
cannot be supernatural. It may be weak, it may be 
insane, but it is not supernatural. Above the natural, 
man cannot rise. There can be deformed ideas, as 
there are deformed persons. There may be religions 
monstrous and misshapen, but they were naturally 
produced. The world is to each man according to 
each man. It takes the world as it really is, and that 
man, to make that man's world. 

You may ask, And what of all this ? I reply, 
As with everything in nature, so with the bible. It 
has a different story for each reader. Is, then, the 
bible a different book to every human being who 
reads it ? It is. Can God, through the bible, make 
precisely the same revelation to two persons ? He 
cannot. Why ? Because no two persons are alike, 
and because the men who read it are not inspired. 
God should inspire readers as well as writers. 



l8o INSPIRATION. 

You may reply : God knew that his book would 
be understood differently by each one, and intended 
that it should be understood as it is understood 
by each. If this be so, then my understanding of the 
bible is the real revelation to me. If this be so, 
I have no right to take the understanding of another. 
I must take the revelation made to me through 
my understanding, and by that revelation I must 
stand. Suppose, then, that I read this bible honestly, 
fairly, and when I get through am compelled to say, 
The book is not true. If this is the honest result, 
then you are compelled to say, either that God has 
made no revelation to me, or that the revelation that it 
is not true is the revelation made to me, and by which 
I am bound. If the book and my brain are both the 
work of the same infinite God, whose fault is it that 
the book and brain do not agree ? Either God 
should have written a book to fit my brain, or should 
have made my brain to fit his book. The inspiration 
of the bible depends upon the credulity of him who 
reads. There was a time when its geology, its 
astronomy, its natural history, were thought to be in- 
spired ; that time has passed. There was a time when 
its morality satisfied the men who ruled the world of 
thought : that time has passed. 



RELIGIOUS LIBERTY OF THE BIBLE. 




HIS is the religious liberty of the Bible: 
If you had lived in Palestine, and if the 
wife of your bosom, dearer to you than 
your own soul, had said : " I like the 
religion of India better than that of 
Palestine," it would have been your 
duty to kill her. " Your eye must not pity her, your 
hand must be first upon her, and afterwards the hand 
of all the people." If she had said : " Let us worship 
the sun— the sun that clothes the earth in garments 
of green — the sun, the great fireside of the world — 
the sun that covers the hills and valleys with flowers 
— that gave me your face, and made it possible for me 
to look into the eyes of my babe — let us worship the 
sun," it was your duty to kill her. You must throw 
the first stone, and when against her bosom — a 
bosom filled with love for you — you had thrown the 



1 82 RELIGIOUS LIBERTY OF THE BIBLE. 

jagged and cruel rock, and had seen the red stream 
of her life oozing from the dumb lips of death, you 
could then look up and receive the congratulations of 
the God whose commandment you had obeyed. Is 
it possible that a being of infinite mercy ordered 
a husband to kill his wife for the crime of having 
expressed an opinion on the subject of religion ? 
Has there been found upon the records of the savag< 
world anything more perfectly fiendish than thi: 
commandment of Jehovah ? This is justified on th< 
ground that " blasphemy was a breach of political 
allegiance, and idolatry an act of overt treason." W< 
can understand how a human king stands in need of 
the service of his people. We can understand how 
the desertion of any of his soldiers weakens his army ; 
but were the king infinite in power, his strength 
would still remain the same, and under no con- 
ceivable circumstances could the enemy triumph. 

I insist that, if there is an infinitely good and 
wise God, he beholds with pity the misfortunes of his 
children. I insist that such a God would know the 
mists, the clouds, the darkness enveloping the human 
mind. He would know how few stars are visible 
in the intellectual sky. His pity, not his wrath, 



RELIGIOUS LIBERTY OF THE BIBLE. 183 

would be excited by the efforts of his blind children, 
groping in the night to find the cause of things, and 
endeavoring, through their tears, to see some dawn 
of hope. Filled with awe by their surroundings, by 
fear of the unknown, he would know that when, 
kneeling, they poured out their gratitude to some 
unseen power, even to a visible idol, it was, in fact, 
intended for him. An infinitely good being, had he 
the power, would answer the reasonable prayer of an 
honest savage, even when addressed to wood and 
stone. 



THE LAUGH OF A CHILD. 




HE laugh of a child will make the holiest 
day more sacred still. Strike with hand 
of fire, O weird musician ! thy harp strung 
with Apollo's golden hair; fill the vast 
cathedral aisles with symphonies sweet 
and dim, deft toucher of the organ keys ; 
blow, bugler, blow, until the silver notes do touch and 
kiss the moonlit waves, and charm the lovers wander- 
ing midst the vine-clad hills : but know, your sweetest 
strains are discords all, compared with childhood's 
happy laugh — the laugh that fills the eyes with light 
and every heart with joy. O rippling river of laughter ! 
thou art the blessed boundary line between the beasts 
and men ; and every wayward wave of thine doth 
drown some fretful fiend of care. O Laughter ! rose- 
lipped daughter of Joy, make dimples enough in thy 
cheeks to catch and hold and glorify all the tears of 
grief. 



THE CHRISTIAN NIGHT. 




O we not know that when the Roman em- 
pire fell, darkness settled on the world ? 
Do we not know that this darkness 
lasted for a thousand years, and that 
during all that time the church of Christ 
held with bloody hands, the sword of 
power ? These years were the starless midnight 
of our race. Art died, law was forgotten, toleration 
ceased to exist, charity fled from the human breast, 
and justice was unknown. Kings were tyrants, 
priests were pitiless, and the poor multitude were 
slaves. In the name of Christ, men made instru- 
ments of torture, and the auto da fe took the place 
of the gladiatorial show. Liberty was in chains, 
honesty in dungeons, while Christian superstition 
ruled mankind. Christianity compromised with Pa- 
ganism. The statues of Jupiter were used to repre- 



l86 THE CHRISTIAN NIGHT. 

sent Jehovah. Isis and her babe were changed to 
Mary and the infant Christ. The Trinity of Egypt 
became the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The sim- 
plicity of the early Christians was lost in heathen 
rites and Pagan pomp. The believers in the blessed- 
ness of poverty became rich, avaricious, and grasping; 
and those who had said, " Sell all, and give to the 
poor," became the ruthless gatherers of tithes and 
taxes. In a few years the teachings of Jesus were 
forgotten. The gospels were interpolated by the de- 
signing and ambitious. The church was infinitely 
corrupt. Crime was crowned, and virtue scourged. 
The minds of men were saturated with superstition. 
Miracles, apparitions, angels, and devils had posses- 
sion of the world. The nights were filled with incubi 
and succubi. Devils, clad in wondrous forms, and 
imps, in hideous shapes, sought to tempt or fright the 
soldiers of the cross. The maddened spirits of the air 
sent hail and storm. Sorcerers wrought sudden 
death, and witches worked with spell and charm 
against the common weal. In every town the stake 
arose. Faith carried fagots to the feet of philosophy. 
Priests fed and fanned the eager flames. The dun- 
geon was the foundation of the cathedral. Priests 






THE CHRISTIAN NIGHT. 187 

sold charms and relics to their flocks to keep away 
the wolves of hell. Thousands of Christians, failing 
to find protection in the church, sold their poor souls 
to Satan for some magic wand. Suspicion sat in 
every house, families were divided, wives denounced 
husbands, husbands denounced wives, and children 
their parents. Every calamity then, as now, in- 
creased the power of the church. Pestilence sup- 
ported the pulpit, and famine was the right hand of 
faith. Christendom was insane. 



MY CHOICE. 




WOULD rather go to the forest, far away, 
and build me a little cabin — build it my- 
self — and daub it with clay, and live there 
with my wife and children ; and have a 
winding path leading down to the spring 
where the water bubbles out, day and 
night, whispering a poem to the white pebbles, from 
the heart of the earth ; a little hut with some holly- 
hocks at the corner, with their bannered bosoms open 
to the sun, and a thrush in the air like a winged joy — 
I would rather live there and have some lattice work 
across the window so that the sun-light would fall 
checkered on the babe in the cradle — I would rather 
live there, with my soul erect and free, than in a 
palace of gold, and wear a crown of imperial power, 
and feel that I was superstition's cringing slave, and 
dare not speak my honest thought 



WHY? 




F Christ was in fact God, he knew all 
the future. Before him, like a panorama, 
moved the history yet to be. He knew 
exactly how his words would be inter- 
preted. He knew what crimes, what 
horrors, what infamies, would be com- 
mitted in his name. He knew that the fires of perse- 
cution would climb around the limbs of countless 
martyrs. He knew that brave men would languish 
in dungeons, in darkness, filled with pain ; that the 
Church would use instruments of torture, that his 
followers would appeal to whip and chain. He must 
have seen the horizon of the future red with the 
flames of the auto da fe. He knew all the creeds 
that would spring like poisonous fungi from every 
text. He saw the sects waging war against each 
other. He saw thousands of men, under the orders 



I90 WHY ? 

of priests, building dungeons for their fellow-men. 
He saw them using instruments of pain. He heard 
the groans, saw the faces white with agony, the tears, 
the blood — heard the shrieks and sobs of all the 
moaning, martyred multitudes. He knew that com- 
mentaries would be written on his words with 
swords, to be read by the light of fagots. He knew 
that the Inquisition would be born of teachings 
attributed to him. He saw all the interpolations and 
falsehoods that hypocrisy would write and tell. He 
knew that above these fields of death, these dungeons, 
these burnings, for a thousand years would float the 
dripping banner of the cross. He knew that in his 
name his followers would trade in human flesh, that 
cradles would be robbed, and women's breasts un- 
babed for gold, and yet he died with voiceless lips. 
Why did he fail to speak ? Why did he not tell his 
disciples, and through them the world, that man 
should not persecute, for opinion's sake, his fellow- 
man ? Why did he not cry, You shall not persecute 
in my name ; you shall not burn and torment those 
who differ from you in creed ? Why did he not 
plainly say, I am the Son of God ? Why did he not 
explain the doctrine of the trinity ? Why did he 



WHY ? I9I 

not tell the manner of baptism that was pleasing to 
him ? Why did he not say something positive, 
definite, and satisfactory about another world ? Why 
did he not turn the tear-stained hope of heaven to the 
glad knowledge of another life ? Why did he go 
dumbly to his death, leaving the world to misery and 
to doubt ? 



IMAGINATION. 




T may be that a crime appears terrible in pro- 
portion as we realize its consequences. If 
this is true, morality may depend largely 
upon the imagination. Man can not have 
imagination at will ; that, certainly, is a 
natural product. And yet, a man's action 
may depend largely upon the want of imagination. 
One man may feel that he really wishes to kill another. 
He may make preparations to commit the deed ; and 
yet, his imagination may present such pictures of 
horror and despair ; he may so vividly see the widow 
clasping the mangled corpse ; he may so plainly hear 
the cries and sobs of orphans, while the clods fall upon 
the coffin, that his hand is stayed. Another, lacking 
imagination, thirsting only for revenge, seeing nothing 
beyond the accomplishment of the deed, buries, with 
blind and thoughtless hate, the dagger in his victim's 
heart. 



SCIENCE, 




ROM a philosophical point of view, science 
is knowledge of the laws of life ; of the 
conditions of happiness ; of the facts by 
which we are surrounded, and the rela- 
tions we sustain to men and things — by- 
means of which man subjugates nature 
and bends the elemental powers to his will, making 
blind force the servant of his brain. 

Science is the great Iconoclast, and by the high- 
way of Progress are the broken images of the Past. 
On every hand the people advance. The Vicar 
of God has been pushed from the throne of the 
Caesars, and upon the roofs of the Eternal City falls 
once more the shadow of the Eagle. All has been 
accomplished by the heroic few. The men of science 
have explored heaven and earth, and with infinite 
patience have furnished the facts. The brave thinkers 



194 SCIENCE. 

have used them. The gloomy caverns of super- 
stition have been transformed into temples of thpught, 
and the demons of the past are the angels of to-day. 
Science took a handful of sand, constructed a tele- 
scope, and with it explored the starry depths of 
heaven. Science wrested from the gods their thunder- 
bolts ; and now, the electric spark, freighted with 
thought and love, flashes under all the waves of 
the sea. Science took a tear from the cheek of un- 
paid labor, converted it into steam, and created a 
giant that turns with tireless arm, the countless 
wheels of toil. 



IF DEATH ENDS ALL. 




ND suppose, after all, that death does end 
all. Next to eternal joy, next to being 
forever with those we love and those 
who have loved us, — next to that, is to be 
wrapt in the dreamless drapery of eternal 
peace. Next to eternal life is eternal sleep. Upon 
the shadowy shore of death the sea of trouble casts 
no wave. Eyes that have been curtained by the 
everlasting dark will never know again the burning 
touch of tears. Lips touched by eternal silence will 
never speak again the broken words of grief. Hearts 
of dust do not break. The dead do not weep. 
Within the tomb no veiled and weeping sorrow sits, 
and in the rayless gloom is crouched no shuddering 
fear. 

I had rather think of those I have loved, and lost, 
as having returned to earth, as having become a part 



I96 IF DEATH ENDS ALL. 

of the elemental wealth of the world ; I would rather 
think of them as unconscious dust ; I would rather 
dream of them as gurgling in the stream, floating 
in the clouds, bursting in light upon the shores of 
other worlds ; I would rather think of them as the 
lost visions of a forgotten night, than to have even 
the faintest fear that their naked souls have been 
clutched by an orthodox god. But as for me, I will 
leave the dead where nature leaves them. Whatever 
flower of hope springs in my heart I will cherish ; I 
will give it breath of sighs and rain of tears. 



HERE AND THERE. 




HE clergy balance the real ills of this life 
with the expected joys of the next. We 
are assured that all is perfection in 
heaven ; there the skies are cloudless, 
there all is serenity and peace. Here 
empires may be overthrown ; dynasties 
may be extinguished in blood ; millions of slaves 
may toil 'neath the fierce rays of the sun, and the 
cruel strokes of the lash ; yet all is happiness in 
heaven. Pestilence may strew the earth with corpses 
of the loved ; the survivors may bend above them in 
agony, yet the placid bosom of heaven is unruffled. 
Children may expire, vainly asking for bread ; babes 
may be devoured by serpents, while the gods sit 
smiling in the clouds. The innocent may languish 
unto death in the obscurity of dungeons ; brave men 
and heroic women may be changed to ashes at the 



I98 HERE AND THERE. 

bigot's stake, while heaven is filled with song and 
joy. Out on the wide sea, in darkness and in storm, 
the shipwrecked struggle with the cruel waves while 
the angels play upon their golden harps. The streets 
of the world are filled with the diseased, the deformed 
and the helpless ; the chambers of pain are crowded 
with the pale forms of the suffering, while the angels 
float and fly in the happy realms of day. In heaven 
they are too happy to have sympathy ; too busy 
singing to aid the imploring and distressed. Their 
eyes are blinded ; their ears are stopped, and their 
hearts are turned to stone by the infinite selfishness 
of joy. The saved mariner is too happy when he 
touches the shore, to give a moment's thought to his 
drowning brothers. With the indifference of happi- 
ness, with the contempt of bliss, heaven barely 
glances at the miseries of earth. Cities are devoured 
by the rushing lava ; the earth opens, and thousands 
perish ; women raise their clasped hands toward 
heaven, but the gods are too happy to aid their 
children. The smiles of the deities are unacquainted 
with the tears of men. The shouts of heaven drown 
the sobs of earth. 



HOW LONG? 




HE dogma of eternal punishment rests 
upon passages in the New Testament. 
This infamous belief subverts every 
idea of justice. Around the angel of 
immortality the Church has coiled this 
serpent. A finite being can neither 
commit an infinite sin, nor a sin against the infinite. 
A being of infinite goodness and wisdom has no right, 
according to the human standard of justice, to create 
any being destined to suffer eternal pain. A being 
of infinite wisdom would not create a failure, and 
surely a man destined to everlasting agony is not 
a success. 

How long, according to the universal benevolence 
of the New Testament, can a man be reasonably 
punished in the next world for failing to believe 
something unreasonable in this ? Can it be possible 



200 HOW LOxNG ? 

that any punishment can endure forever ? Suppose 
that every flake of snow that ever fell was a figure 
nine, and that the* first flake was multiplied by the 
second, and that product by the third, and so on to 
the last flake. And then suppose that this tota 
should be multiplied by every drop of rain that eve] 
fell, calling each drop a figure nine ; and that tota 
by each blade of grass that ever helped to weav< 
a carpet for the earth, calling each blade a figun 
nine ; and that again by every grain of sand on every 
shore, so that the grand total would make a line of 
figures so long that it would require millions upon 
millions of years for light, traveling at the rate of one 
hundred and eighty-five thousand miles per second, 
to reach the end. And suppose, further, that each 
unit in this almost infinite total stood for billions 
of ages — still that vast and almost endless time, 
measured by all the years beyond, is as one flake, one 
drop, one leaf, one blade, one grain, compared with 
all the flakes, and drops, and leaves, and blades, and 
grains. 

Upon love's breast the Church has placed the 
eternal asp. 




LIBERTY. 

O preserve liberty is the only use for gov- 
ernment. There is no other excuse for 
legislatures, or presidents, or courts, for 
statutes or decisions. Liberty is not 
simply a means — it is an end. Take 
from our history, our literature, our 
laws, our hearts — that word, and we are nought but 
moulded clay. Liberty is the one priceless jewel. It 
includes and holds and is the weal and wealth of life. 
Liberty is the soil and light and rain — it is the plant 
and bud and flower and fruit — and in that sacred 
word lie all the seeds of progress, love and joy. 

Liberty is not a social question. Civil equality is 
not social equality. We are equal only in rights. No 
two persons are of equal weight, or height. There 
are no two leaves in all the forests of the earth alike — 
no two blades of grass — no two grains of sand — no 



202 LIBERTY. 

two hairs. No two anythings in the physical world 
are precisely alike. Neither mental nor physical 
equality can be created by law, but law recognizes the 
fact that all men have been clothed with equal rights 
by Nature, the mother of us all. 

The man who hates the black man, because he is 
black, has the same spirit as he who hates the poor 
man, because he is poor. It is the spirit of caste. 
The proud useless despises the honest useful. The 
parasite idleness scorns the great oak of labor on 
which it feeds and that lifts it to the light. 

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I 
trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason 
of the accidents of race or color. They are superior 
who have the best heart — the best brain. Superiority 
is born of honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all, 
of the love of liberty. The superior man is the provi- 
dence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, 
strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. 
He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He 
rises by lifting others. 



JEHOVAH AND BRAHMA. 




AN we believe that Jehovah ever said of 
any one : " Let his children be father- 
less and his wife a widow ; let his 
children be continually vagabonds, and 
beg ; let them seek their bread also out 
of their desolate places ; let the extor- 
tioner catch all that he hath and let the stranger spoil 
his labor ; let there be none to extend mercy unto 
him, neither let there be any to favor his fatherless 
children." If he ever said these words, surely he had 
never heard this line, this strain of music, from the 
Hindu : " Sweet is the lute to those who have not 
heard the prattle of their own children." 

Jehovah, " from the clouds and darkness of Sinai," 
said to the Jews : " Thou shalt have no other gods 
before me. . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to 
them nor serve them ; for I, the Lord thy God, am a 



204 JEHOVAH AND BRAHMA. 

jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon 
the children, unto the third and fourth generation of 
them that hate me." Contrast this with the words 
put by the Hindu in the mouth of Brahma: " I am 
the same to all mankind. They who honestly serve 
other gods, involuntarily worship me. I am he who 
partaketh of all worship, and I am the reward of all 
worshipers." 

Compare these passages. The first, a dungeon 
where crawl the things begot of jealous slime ; the 
other, great as the domed firmament inlaid with suns. 



THE FREE SOUL. 




URELY every human being ought to at- 
tain to the dignity of the unit. Surely 
it is worth something to be one, and to 
feel that the census of the universe would 
be incomplete without counting you. 
Surely there is grandeur in knowing that 
in the realm of thought you are without a chain ; 
that you have the right to explore all heights and all 
depths ; that there are no walls or fences, or prohibited 
places, or sacred corners in all the vast expanse of 
thought ; that your intellect owes no allegiance to 
any being, human or divine ; that you hold all in fee, 
and upon no condition, and by no tenure, whatever ; 
that in the world of mind you are relieved from all 
personal dictation, and from the ignorant tyranny of 
majorities. Surely it is worth something to feel that 
there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no govern- 



206 THE FREE SOUL. 

ments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can 
be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. Surely it 
is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigotry 
can devise no prison, no dungeon, no cell in which 
for one instant to confine a thought ; that ideas can- 
not be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, 
nor burned with fire. Surely it is sublime to think 
that the brain is a castle, and that within its curious 
bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all 
worlds and all beings, is the supreme sovereign 
of itself. 






MY POSITION. 




O not misunderstand me. My position is, 
that the cruel passages in the Old Testa- 
ment are not inspired ; that slavery, 
polygamy, wars of extermination, and 
religious persecution always have been, 
are, and forever will be, abhorred and 
cursed by the honest, the virtuous, and the loving ; 
that the innocent cannot justly suffer for the guilty ; 
that vicarious vice and vicarious virtue are equally 
absurd ; that eternal punishment is eternal revenge ; 
that only the natural can happen ; that miracles prove 
the dishonesty of the few and the credulity of the 
many ; and that, according to Matthew, Mark, and 
Luke, salvation does not depend upon belief, nor 
the atonement, nor a " second birth," but that these 
gospels are in exact harmony with the declaration 
of the great Persian : " Taking the first footstep with 



208 MY POSITION. 

the good thought, the second with the good word, 
and the third with the good deed, I entered paradise." 
The dogmas of the past no longer reach the level 
of the highest thought, nor satisfy the hunger of the 
heart. While dusty faiths, embalmed and sepulchred 
in ancient texts, remain the same, the sympathies 
of men enlarge ; the brain no longer kills its young; 
the happy lips give liberty to honest thoughts ; the 
mental firmament expands and lifts ; the broken 
clouds drift by ; and hideous dreams, the foul, mis- 
shapen children of the monstrous night, dissolve and 
fade. 



GOOD AND BAD, 




ONSEQUENCES determine the quality 
of an action. If consequences are good, 
so is the action. If actions had no con- 
sequences, they would be neither good 
nor bad. Man did not get his knowledge 
of the consequences of actions from 
God, but from experience and reason. If man can, 
by actual experiment, discover the right and wrong 
of actions, is it not utterly illogical to declare that they 
who do not believe in God can have no standard of 
right and wrong ? Consequences are the standard by 
which actions are judged. They are the children that 
testify as to the real character of their parents. God, 
or no God, larceny is the enemy of industry ; industry 
is the mother of prosperity ; prosperity is a good, and 
therefore larceny is an evil. God, or no God, murder 
is a crime. There has always been a law against 



2IO GOOD AND BAD. 

larceny, because the laborer wishes to enjoy the fruit 
of his toil. As long as men object to being killed, 
murder will be illegal. 

We know that acts are good, or bad, only as they 
affect the actors, and others. We know that from 
every good act good consequences flow, and that from 
every bad act there are only evil results. Every 
virtuous deed is a star in the moral firmament. There 
is in the moral world, as in the physical, the absolute 
and perfect relation of cause and effect. For this 
reason, the atonement becomes an impossibility. 
Others may suffer by your crime, but their suffering 
cannot discharge you ; it simply increases your guilt 
and adds to your burden. For this reason, happiness 
is not a reward — it is a consequence. Suffering is 
not a punishment — it is a result. 



THE MIRACULOUS BOOK. 




LITTLE while ago I saw one of the bibles 
of the Middle Ages. It was about two 
feet in length, and one-and-a-half in width. 
It had immense oaken covers, with hasps, 
and clasps, and hinges large enough 
almost for the doors of a penitentiary. It was covered 
with pictures of winged angels and aureoled saints. 
In my imagination I saw this book carried to the 
cathedral altar in solemn pomp ; heard the chant 
of robed and kneeling priests ; felt the strange tremor 
of the organ's peal ; saw the colored light streaming 
through windows stained and touched by blood and 
flame — the swinging censer with its perfumed incense 
rising to the mighty roof, dim with height and 
rich with legend carved in stone, while on the walls 
was hung, written in light, and shade, and all the 
colors that can tell of joy and tears, the pictured 



212 THE MIRACULOUS BOOK. 

history of the martyred Christ. The people fell upon 
their knees. The book was opened, and the priest 
read the pretended messages from God to man. To 
the ignorant multitude, the book itself was evidence 
enough that it was not the work of human hands. 
How could those little marks and lines and dots con- 
tain, like tombs, the thoughts of men, and how could 
they, touched by a ray of light from human eyes, 
give up their dead ? How could those crooked 
characters span the vast chasm between the present 
and the past, and make it possible for living men to 
hear the silent voices of the dead ? 



ORTHODOX DOTAGE. 




N this age of fact and demonstration, it is 
refreshing to find a man who believes 
thoroughly in the monstrous and miracu- 
lous, the impossible and immoral ; who 
still clings lovingly to the legends of the 
bib and rattle ; who through the bitter 
experiences of a wicked world has kept the credulity 
of the cradle, and finds comfort and joy in thinking 
about the Garden of Eden, the subtile serpent, the 
flood, and Babel's tower stopped by the jargon of a 
thousand tongues ; who reads with happy eyes the 
story of the burning brimstone storm that fell upon 
the cities of the plain, and smilingly explains the 
transformation of the retrospective Mrs. Lot ; who 
laughs at Egypt's plagues and Pharaoh's whelmed 
and drowning hosts ; eats manna with the wander- 
ing Jews, warms himself at the burning bush, sees 



214 ORTHODOX DOTAGE. 

Korah's company by the hungry earth devoured, 
claps his wrinkled hands with glee above the heathens' 
butchered babes, and longingly looks back to the 
patriarchal days of concubines and slaves. How 
touching, when the learned and wise crawl back in 
cribs and ask to hear the rhymes and fables once 
again ! How charming in these hard and scientific 
times, to see old age in Superstition's lap, with eager 
lips upon her withered breast ! 



THE ABOLITIONISTS. 




^LAVERY held both branches of Congress ; 
filled the chair of the Executive ; sat upon 
the supreme bench ; had in its hands all 
rewards, all offices ; knelt in the pew ; 
occupied the pulpit ; stole human beings 
in the name of God ; robbed the trundle- 
bed for love of Christ ; incited mobs ; led ignorance ; 
ruled colleges; sat in the chairs of professors; dominated 
the public press ; closed the lips of free speech, and 
polluted with its leprous hand every source and 
spring of power. The abolitionists attacked this 
monster. They were the bravest, grandest men of 
their country and their century. Denounced by 
thieves, hated by hypocrites, mobbed by cowards, 
slandered by priests, shunned by politicians, abhorred 
by the seekers of office, — these men "of whom the 
world was not worthy," in spite of all opposition, in 



2l6 THE ABOLITIONISTS. 

spite of poverty and want, conquered innumerable 
obstacles, never faltering for one moment, never dis- 
mayed, accepting defeat with a smile born of infinite 
hope — knowing that they were right — insisted and 
persisted until every chain was broken, until slave- 
pens became school-houses, and three millions of 
slaves became free men, women, and children. 



PROVIDENCE. 




BELIEF in special providence does away 
with the spirit of investigation, and is 
inconsistent with personal effort. Why 
should man endeavor to thwart the 
designs of God? " Which of you, by 
taking thought, can add one cubit to his stature?" 
Under the influence of this belief, man, basking in the 
sunshine of a delusion, " considers the lilies of the field " 
and refuses to "take any thought for the morrow." 
Believing himself in the power of an infinite being, 
who can, at any moment, dash him to the lowest hell, 
or raise him to the highest heaven, he necessarily 
abandons the idea of accomplishing anything by his 
own efforts. As long as this belief was general, the 
world was filled with ignorance, superstition and 
misery. The energies of man were wasted in a vain 
effort to obtain the aid of this power, supposed to be 



2l8 PROVIDENCE. 

superior to nature. For countless ages, even men 
were sacrificed upon the altar of this impossible god. 
To please him, mothers have shed the blood of their 
own babes ; martyrs have chanted triumphant songs 
in the midst of flame ; priests have gorged themselves 
with blood ; nuns have forsworn the ecstacies of love ; 
old men have tremblingly implored ; women have 
sobbed and entreated ; every pain has been endured, 
and every horror has been perpetrated. 

Through the dim long years that have fled, 
humanity has suffered more than can be conceived. 
Most of the misery has been endured by the weak, 
the loving and the innocent. Women have been 
treated like poisonous beasts, and little children 
trampled upon as though they had been vermin. 
Numberless altars have been reddened, even with the 
blood of babes ; beautiful girls have been given to 
slimy serpents, whole races of men doomed to 
centuries of slavery, and everywhere there has been 
outrage beyond the power of genius to express. 
During all these years the suffering have supplicated ; 
the withered lips of famine have prayed ; the pale 
victims have implored, and Heaven has been deaf 
and blind. 



THE MAN CHRIST. 




OR the man Christ — for the reformer 
who loved his fellow-men — for the man 
who believed in an Infinite Father, who 
would shield the innocent and protect 
the just — for the martyr who expected 
to be rescued from the cruel cross, and 
who at last, finding that his hope was dust, cried out 
in the gathering gloom of death : " My God ! 
My God ! Why hast thou forsaken me?" — for that 
great and suffering man, mistaken though he was, I 
have the highest admiration and respect. That man 
did not, as I believe, claim a miraculous origin. He 
did not pretend to heal the sick or raise the dead. 
He claimed simply to be a man, and taught his 
fellow-men that love is stronger far than hate. His 
life was written by reverent ignorance. Loving 
credulity belittled his career with feats of jugglery 



220 THE MAN CHRIST. 

and magic art, and priests, wishing to persecute and 
slay, put in his mouth the words of hatred and re- 
venge. The theological Christ is the impossible 
union of the human and divine — man with the 
attributes of God, and God with the limitations and 
weaknesses of man. 



THE DIVINE SALUTATION. 




HEN I was a boy I used to see steamers 
go down the Mississippi with hundreds 
of men and women chained hand to 
hand, and men standing about them 
with whips in their hands and pistols 
in their pockets in the name of liberty, 
in the name of civilization and in the name of religion ! 
I used to hear them preach to these slaves in the 
South, and the only text they ever took was " Servants 
be obedient unto your masters." That was the 
salutation of the most merciful God to a man whose 
back was bleeding. That was the salutation of the 
loving Christ to the slave-mother bending over an 
empty cradle, to the woman from whose breast a child 
had been stolen — " Servants be obedient unto your 
masters." That was what they said to a man running 
for his life and for his liberty through tangled swamps, 
and listening for the baying of blood-hounds ; and 
when he listened the angelic voice came from heaven : 
" Servants be obedient unto your masters." 



AT THE GRAVE OF BENJ. W. PARKER. 




RIENDS and neighbors : To fulfill a 
promise made many years ago, I wish 
to say a word. 

He whom we are about to lay in the 
earth, was gentle, kind and loving in his 
life. He was ambitious only to live with 
those he loved. He was hospitable, generous, and 
sincere. He loved his friends, and the friends of his 
friends. He returned good for good. He lived the 
life of a child, and died without leaving in the memory 
of his family the record of an unkind act. Without 
assurance, and without fear, we give him back to 
Nature, the source and mother of us all. 

With morn, with noon, with night ; with changing 
clouds and changeless stars ; with grass and trees 
and birds, with leaf and bud, with flower and blossom- 
ing vine, — with all the sweet influences of nature, we 
leave our dead. 

Husband, father, friend, farewell. 



FASHION AND BEAUTY, 




AM a believer in fashion. It is the duty of 
every woman to make herself as beautiful 
and attractive as she possibly can. " Hand- 
some is as handsome does ; " but she is 
much handsomer if well dressed. Every 
man should look his very best. I am a 
believer in good clothes. The time never ought to 
come in this country when you can tell a farmer's 
daughter simply by the garments she wears. I say 
to every girl and woman, no matter what the material 
of your dress may be, no matter how cheap and coarse 
it is, cut it and make it in the fashion. I believe in 
jewelry. Some people look upon it as barbaric, but 
in my judgment, wearing jewelry is the first evidence 
the barbarian gives of a wish to be civilized. To adorn 
ourselves seems to be a part of our nature, and this 
desire seems to be everywhere and in everything. I 



224 FASHION AND BEAUTY. 

have sometimes thought that the desire for beauty 
covers the earth with flowers, paints the wings of 
moths, tints the chamber of the shell, and gives the 
bird its plumage and its song. O daughters and 
wives, if you would be loved, adorn yourselves — if 
you would be adored, be beautiful ! 



t 






fre 
for 



est M whence it cometh 

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Ztz 



: :.:v:: >_-.:-" :7:. ;-.;t ::;:rs ±=: shed n: re^rs. 

7h:u ir: ::.r ^:t:.: :"-vf::;^- 7:/" ::.::;. -;,:- 



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226 APOSTROPHE TO SCIENCE. 

pain. Thou "hast given thy beloved sleep/' and 
wrapt in happy dreams the throbbing nerves of pain. 

Thou art the perpetual providence of man — 
builder of homes, preserver of love and life ! Thou 
gavest us the plow and loom, and thou hast fed and 
clothed the world ! 

Thou art the teacher of every virtue, the enemy 
of every vice, discoverer of every fact. Thou hast 
given the true basis of morals — the origin and office 
of conscience. Thou hast revealed the nature of ob- 
ligation, and hast taught that justice is the highest 
form of love. Thou hast shown that even self-love, 
guided by intelligence, embraces with loving arms 
the human race. 

Thou hast slain the monsters 01 superstition, and 
thou hast given to man the one inspired book. Thou 
hast read the records of the rocks, written by wind 
and wave, by frost and fire — records that even priest- 
craft cannot change, and in thy wondrous scales hast 
weighed the atom and the star ! 

Thou hast founded the true religion. Thou art 
the very Christ, the only saviour of mankind ! 



ELIZUR WRIGHT. 




NOTHER hero has fallen asleep — one 
who enriched the world with an honest 
life. 

Elizur Wright was one of the Titans 
who attacked the monsters, the Gods, 
of his time — one of the few whose 
confidence in liberty was never shaken, and who, with 
undimmed eyes, saw the atrocities and barbarisms of 
his day and the glories of the future. 

When New York was degraded enough to mob 
Arthur Tappan, the noblest of her citizens ; when 
Boston was sufficiently infamous to howl and hoot at 
Harriet Martineau, the grandest Englishwoman that 
ever touched our soil ; when the north was dominated 
by theology and trade, by piety and piracy ; when we 
received our morals from merchants, and made mer- 
chandise of our morals, Elizur Wright held principle 



228 ELIZUR WRIGHT. 

above profit, and preserved his manhood at the peril 
of his life. 

When the rich, the cultured, and the respecta- 
ble, — when church members and ministers, who had 
been " called " to preach the " glad tidings," and 
when statesmen like Webster joined with blood- 
hounds, and in the name of God hunted men and 
mothers, this man rescued the fugitives and gave 
asylum to the oppressed. 

During those infamous years — years of cruelty and 
national degradation — years of hypocrisy and greed 
and meanness beneath the reach of any English word, 
Elizur Wright became acquainted with the orthodox 
church. He found that a majority of Christians were 
willing to enslave men and women for whom the]* 
said that Christ had died — that they would steal the | 
babe of a Christian mother, although they believed 
that the mother would be their equal in heaven for- 
ever. He found that those who loved their enemies 
would enslave their friends — that people who when 
smitten on one cheek turned the other, were ready, 
willing and anxious to mob and murder those who 
simply said " The laborer is worthy of his hire." 

In those days the church was in favor of slavery, 



ELIZUR WRIGHT. 229 

not only of the body but of the mind. According to 
the creeds, God himself was an infinite master and 
all his children serfs. He ruled with whip and chain, 
with pestilence and fire. Devils were his blood- 
hounds, and hell his place of eternal torture. 

Elizur Wright said to himself, why should we 
take chains from bodies and enslave minds — why 
fight to free the cage and leave the bird a prisoner ? 
He became an enemy of orthodox religion — that is 
to say, ,a friend of intellectual liberty. 

He lived to see the destruction of legalized lar- 
ceny ; to read the Proclamation of Emancipation ; to 
see a country without a slave, a flag without a stain. 
He lived long enough to reap the reward for having 
been an honest man ; long enough for his "disgrace" 
to become a crown of glory ; long enough to see 
his views adopted and his course applauded by the 
civilized world ; long enough for the hated word 
"abolitionist" to become a title of nobility, a certificate 
of manhood, courage and true patriotism. 

Only a few years ago, the heretic was regarded 
as an enemy of the human race. The man who 
denied the inspiration of the Jewish Scriptures was 
looked upon as a moral leper, and the atheist as the 



230 ELIZUR WRIGHT. 

worst of criminals. Even in that day, Elizur Wright 
was grand enough to speak his honest thought, to 
deny the inspiration of the bible ; brave enough to 
defy the God of the orthodox church — the Jehovah 
of the Old Testament, the Eternal Jailor, the Ever- 
lasting Inquisitor. 

He contended that a good God would not have 
upheld slavery and polygamy ; that a loving Father 
would not assist some of his children to enslave or 
exterminate their brethren ; that an infinite being 
would not be unjust, irritable, jealous, revengeful, 
ignorant, and cruel. 

And it was his great good fortune to live long 
enough to find the intellectual world on his side ; 
long enough to know that the greatest naturalists, 
philosophers, and scientists agreed with him; lon^ 
enough to see certain words change places, so that 
" heretic" was honorable and " orthodox" an epithet. 
To day, the heretic is known to be a man of principle 
and courage — one blest with enough mental indepen- 
dence to tell his thought. To day, the thoroughly 
orthodox means the thoroughly stupid. 

Only a few years ago it was taken for granted 
that an " unbeliever" could not be a moral man ; that 



ELIZUR WRIGHT. 23 1 

one who disputed the inspiration of the legends of 
Judea could not be sympathetic and humane, and 
could not really love his fellow-men. Had we no 
other evidence upon this subject, the noble life of 
Elizur Wright would demonstrate the utter baseless- 
ness of these views. 

His life was spent in doing good — in attacking 
the hurtful, in defending what he believed to be the 
truth. Generous beyond his means ; helping others 
help themselves ; always hopeful, busy, just, cheerful ; 
filled with the spirit of reform ; a model citizen — 
always thinking of the public good, devising ways 
and means to save something for posterity, feeling 
that what he had he held in trust ; loving Nature, 
familiar with the poetic side of things, touched to 
enthusiasm by the beautiful thought, the brave word, 
and the generous deed ; friendly in manner, candid 
and kind in speech, modest but persistent; enjoying 
leisure as only the industrious can ; loving and gentle 
in his family ; hospitable, — judging men and women 
regardless of wealth, position or public clamor ; 
physically fearless, intellectually honest, thoroughly 
informed ; unselfish, sincere, and reliable as the 
attraction of gravitation. Such was Elizur Wright, 



232 ELIZUR WRIGHT. 

— one of the staunchest soldiers that ever faced and 
braved for freedom's sake the wrath and scorn and 
lies of place and power. 

A few days ago I met this genuine man. His 
interest in all human things was just as deep and 
keen, his hatred of oppression, his love of freedom, 
just as intense, just as fervid, as on the day I met him 
first. True, his body was old, but his mind was 
young, and his heart, like a spring in the desert, 
bubbled over as joyously as though it had the secret 
of eternal youth. But it has ceased to beat, and the 
mysterious veil that hangs where sight and blindness 
are the same — the veil that revelation has not drawn 
aside — that science cannot lift, has fallen once again 
between the living and the dead. 

And yet we hope and dream. May be the longing 
for another life is but the prophecy forever warm from 
Nature's lips, that love, disguised as death, alone 
fulfills. We cannot tell. And yet perhaps this Hope 
is but an antic, following the fortunes of an uncrowned 
king, beguiling grief with jest and satisfying loss with 
pictured gain. We do not know. 

But from the Christian's cruel hell, and from hi; 
heaven more heartless still, the free and noble soul, 



ELIZUR WRIGHT. 233 

if forced to choose, should loathing turn, and cling 
with rapture to the thought of endless sleep. 

But this we know : good deeds are never childless. 
A noble life is never lost. A virtuous action does not 
die. Elizur Wright scattered with generous hand the 
priceless seeds, and we shall reap the golden grain. 
His words and acts are ours, and all he nobly did is 
living still. 

Farewell, brave soul ! Upon thy grave I lay this 
tribute of respect and love. When last our hands 
were joined, I said these parting words : " Long life 1 " 
And I repeat them now. 



THE IMAGINATION. 




HE man of Imagination, — that is to say, 
of genius — having seen a leaf and a drop 
of water, can construct the forests, the 
rivers, and the seas. In his presence all 
the cataracts fall and foam, the mists rise, 
the clouds form and float. 
To really know one fact, is to know its kindred 
and its neighbors. Shakespeare looking at a coat of 
mail, instantly imagined the society, the conditions, 
that produced it, and what it produced. He saw the 
castle, the moat, the draw-bridge, the lady in the 
tower, and the knightly lover spurring over the plain. 
He saw the bold baron and the rude retainer, the 
trampled serf, and all the glory and the grief of feudal 
life. 

The man of imagination has lived the life of all 
people, of all races. He was a citizen of Athens in 



THE IMAGINATION. 235 

the days of Pericles ; listened to the eager eloquence 
of the great orator, and sat upon the cliff and with 
the tragic poet heard "the multitudinous laughter of 
the sea." He saw Socrates thrust the spear of ques- 
tion through the shield and heart of falsehood ; was 
present when the great man drank hemlock and met 
the night of death tranquil as a star meets morning. 
He has followed the peripatetic philosophers, and has 
been puzzled by the sophists. He has watched 
Phidias as he chiseled shapeless stone to forms of 
love and awe. 

He has lived by the slow Nile amid the vast and 
monstrous. He knows the very thought that wrought 
the form and features of the Sphinx. He has heard 
great Memnon's morning song — has lain him down 
with the embalmed and waiting dead, and felt within 
their dust the expectation of another life mingled with 
cold and suffocating doubts — the children born of 
long delay. 

He has walked the ways of mighty Rome, has 
seen great Caesar with his legions in the field, has 
stood with vast and motley throngs and watched 
the triumphs given to victorious men, followed by 
uncrowned kings, the captured hosts, and all the 






236 THE IMAGINATION. 

spoils of ruthless war. He has heard the shout that 
shook the Coliseum's roofless walls when from the 
reeling gladiator's hand the short sword fell, while 
from his bosom gushed the stream of wasted life. 

He has lived the life of savage men, has trod the 
forest's silent depths, and in the desperate game of 
life or death has matched his thought against the 
instinct of the beast. 

He knows all crimes and all regrets, all virtues 
and their rich rewards. He has been victim and 
victor, pursuer and pursued, outcast and king — has 
heard the applause and curses of the world, and on 
his heart have fallen all the nights and noons of fail- 
ure and success. 

He knows the unspoken thoughts, the dumb 
desires, the wants and ways of beasts. He has felt 
the crouching tiger's thrill, the terror of the ambushed 
prey, and with the eagles he has shared the ecstasy 
of flight and poise and swoop, and he has lain with 
sluggish serpents on the barren rocks, uncoiling 
slowly in the heat of noon. 

He has sat beneath the bo tree's contemplative 
shade, rapt in Buddha's mighty thought ; and he has 
dreamed all dreams that Light, the alchemist, hath 



THE IMAGINATION. 237 

wrought from dust and dew and stored within the 
slumbrous poppy's subtle blood. 

He has knelt with awe and dread at every shrine, 
has offered every sacrifice and every prayer, has felt 
the consolation and the shuddering fear, has seen all 
devils, has mocked and worshiped all the gods — 
enjoyed all heavens and felt the pangs of every hell. 

He has lived all lives, and through his blood and 
brain have crept the shadow and the chill of every 
death ; and his soul, Mazeppa-like, has been lashed 
naked to the wild horse of every fear and love and 
hate. 

The imagination hath a stage within the brain, 
whereon he sets all scenes that lie between the morn 
of laughter and the night of tears, and where his 
players body forth the false and true, the joys and 
griefs, the careless shallows and the tragic deeps of 
every life. 



-NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS." 




EEING the sun shine as well on nations 
that mocked Jehovah as on the one that 
worshiped him — that the rain fell on the 
unjust as well as upon the just — that the 
miracle of growth was wrought for all — 
the ancient believers in God were forced 
to declare : " Our God is no respecter of persons." 

Seeing the dishonest succeed, the honest fail — 
seeing vice in purple, virtue in rags — labor with a 
crust, idleness at a banquet — they were forced to 
adjourn all these cases to another world. 

There was one step more : Those who were the 
most pious seemed to be the most miserable. The 
anointed of God complained of the success and glory 
and triumph of the wicked. Driven to the conclusion 
that those who loved God suffered the most, they 
said : " Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 




TRANGE mingling of mirth and tears, of 
the tragic and grotesque, of cap and crown, 
of Socrates and Rabelais, of ^Esop and 
Marcus Aurelius, of all that is gentle and 
just, humorous and honest, merciful, wise, 
laughable, lovable, and divine, and all con- 
secrated to the use of man ; while through all, and 
over all, an overwhelming sense of obligation, of 
chivalric loyalty to truth, and upon all, the shadow of 
the tragic end. 

Nearly all the great historic characters are impos- 
sible monsters, disproportioned by flattery, or by 
calumny deformed. We know nothing of their 
peculiarities, or nothing but their peculiarities. About 
the roots of these oaks there clings none of the earth 
of humanity. Washington is now only a steel 
engraving. About the real man who lived and loved 



24O ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

and hated and schemed we know but little. The 
glass through which we look at him is of such high 
magnifying power that the features are exceedingly 
indistinct. Hundreds of people are now engaged in 
smoothing out the lines of Lincoln's face — forcing all 
features to the common mould — so that he may be 
known, not as he really was, but, according to their 
poor standard, as he should have been. 

Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone — no 
ancestors, no fellows, and no successors. He had 
the advantage of living in a new country, of social 
equality, of personal freedom, of seeing in the horizon 
of his future the perpetual star of hope. He pre- 
served his individuality and his self-respect. He 
knew and mingled with men of every kind ; and, after 
all, men are the best books. He became acquainted 
with the ambitions and hopes of the heart, the means 
used to accomplish ends, the springs of action and 
the seeds of thought. He was familiar with nature, 
with actual things, with common facts. He loved 
and appreciated the poem of the year, the drama of 
the seasons. 

In a new country a man must possess at least 
three virtues — honesty, courage, and generosity. In 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 24 1 

cultivated society, cultivation is often more important 
than soil. A well executed counterfeit passes more 
readily than a blurred genuine. It is necessary only 
to observe the unwritten laws of society — -to be 
honest enough to keep out of prison, and generous 
enough to subscribe in public — where the subscription 
can be defended as an investment. In a new country, 
character is essential ; in the old, reputation is suffi- 
cient. In the new, they find what a man really is ; 
in the old, he generally passes for what he resembles. 
People separated only by distance are much nearer 
together than those divided by the walls of caste. 

It is no advantage to live in a great city, where 
poverty degrades and failure brings despair. The 
fields are lovelier than paved streets, and the great 
forests than walls of brick. Oaks and elms are more 
poetic than steeples and chimneys. In the country 
is the idea of home. There you see the rising and 
setting sun ; you become acquainted with the stars 
and clouds. The constellations are your friends. 
You hear the rain on the roof and listen to the rhyth- 
mic sighing of the winds. You are thrilled by the 
resurrection called Spring, touched and saddened by 
Autumn — the grace and poetry of death. Every field 



242 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

is a picture, a landscape ; every landscape a poem ; 
every flower a tender thought, and every forest a 
fairy-land. In the country you preserve your iden- 
tity — your personality. There you are an aggregation 
of atoms, but in the city you are only an atom of an 
aggregation. 

Lincoln never finished his education. To the 
night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an inquirer, 
a seeker after knowledge. You have no idea how 
many men are spoiled by what is called education. 
For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles 
are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shake- 
speare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been 
a quibbling attorney, or a hypocritical parson. 

Lincoln was a many-sided man, acquainted with 
smiles and tears, complex in brain, single in heart, 
direct as light ; and his words, candid as mirrors, 
gave the perfect image of his thought. He was 
never afraid to ask — never too dignified to admit 
that he did not know. No man had keener wit, or 
kinder humor. He was not solemn. Solemnity is a 
mask worn by ignorance and hypocrisy — it is the 
preface, prologue, and index to the cunning or the 
stupid. He was natural in his life and thought— 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 243 

master of the story-teller's art, in illustration apt, in 
application perfect, liberal in speech, shocking Phari- 
sees and prudes, using any word that wit could 
disinfect. 

He was a logician. Logic is the necessary product 
of intelligence and sincerity. It cannot be learned. 
It is the child of a clear head and a good heart. 
He was candid, and with candor often deceived 
the deceitful. He had intellect without arrogance, 
genius without pride, and religion without cant — that 
is to say, without bigotry and without deceit. 

He was an orator — clear, sincere, natural. He 
did not pretend. He did not say what he thought 
others thought, but what he thought. If you wish 
to be sublime you must be natural — you must keep 
close to the grass. You must sit by the fireside of 
the heart: above the clouds it is too cold. You 
must be simple in your speech: too much polish 
suggests insincerity. The great orator idealizes the 
real, transfigures the common, makes even the in- 
animate throb and thrill, fills the gallery of the 
imagination with statues and pictures perfect in form 
and color, brings to light the gold hoarded by 
memory the miser, shows the glittering coin to 



244 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

the spendthrift hope, enriches the brain, ennobles 
the heart, and quickens the conscience. Between his 
lips words bud and blossom. 

If you wish to know the difference between an 
orator and an elocutionist — between what is felt. and 
what is said — between what the heart and brain can 
do together and what the brain can do alone — read 
Lincoln's wondrous words at Gettysburg, and then 
the speech of Edward Everett. The oration of Lin- 
coln will never be forgotten. It will live until 
languages are dead and lips are dust. The speech 
of Everett will never be read. The elocutionists 
believe in the virtue of voice, the sublimity of syntax, 
the majesty of long sentences, and the genius of 
gesture. The orator loves the real, the simple, the 
natural. He places the thought above all. He knows 
that the greatest ideas should be expressed in the 
shortest words — that the greatest statues need the 
least drapery. 

Lincoln was an immense personality — firm but not 
obstinate. Obstinacy is egotism — firmness, heroism. 
He influenced others without effort, unconsciously ; 
and they submitted to him as men submit to nature, 
unconsciously. He was severe with himself, and for 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 245 

that reason lenient with others. He appeared to 
apologize for being kinder than his fellows. He did 
merciful things as stealthily as others committed 
crimes. Almost ashamed of tenderness, he said and 
did the noblest words and deeds with that charming 
confusion, that awkwardness, that is the perfect grace 
of modesty. As a noble man, wishing to pay a 
small debt to a poor neighbor, reluctantly offers a 
hundred-dollar bill and asks for change, fearing that 
he may be suspected either of making a display of 
wealth or a pretense of payment, so Lincoln hesitated 
to show his wealth of goodness, even to the best he 
knew. 

A great man stooping, not wishing to make his 
fellows feel that they were small or mean. 

He knew others, because perfectly acquainted with 
himself. He cared nothing for place, but every- 
thing for principle ; nothing for money, but everything 
for independence. Where no principle was involved, 
easily swayed — willing to go slowly if in the right 
direction — sometimes willing to stop; but he would 
not go back, and he would not go wrong. He was 
willing to wait. He knew that the event was not 
waiting, and that fate was not the fool of chance. He 



246 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

knew that slavery had defenders, but no defense, and 
that they who attack the right must wound them- 
selves. He was neither tyrant nor slave. He neither 
knelt nor scorned. With him, men were neither great 
nor small, — they were right or wrong. Through 
manners, clothes, titles, rags and race he saw the 
real — that which is. Beyond accident, policy, com- 
promise and war he saw the end. He was patient as 
Destiny, whose undecipherable hieroglyphs were so 
deeply graven on his sad and tragic face. 

Nothing discloses real character like the use of 
power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most 
people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know 
what a man really is, give him power. This is the 
supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having 
almost absolute power, he never abused it, except 
upon the side of mercy. 

Wealth could not purchase, power could not awe, 
this divine, this loving man. He knew no fear except 
the fear of doing wrong. Hating slavery, pitying 
the master — seeking to conquer, not persons, but 
prejudices — he was the embodiment of the self-denial, 
the courage, the hope, and the nobility of a nation. 
He spoke, not to inflame, not to upbraid, but to con- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 247 

vince. He raised his hands, not to strike, but in 
benediction. He longed to pardon. He loved to see 
the pearls of joy on the cheeks of a wife whose hus- 
band he had rescued from death. 

Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest 
civil war. He is the gentlest memory of our world. 



THE MEANING OF LAW. 




ET it be understood that by the term Law 
is meant the same invariable relations of 
succession and resemblance, predicated 
of all facts springing from like conditions. 
Law is a fact — not a cause. It is a fact, 
that like conditions produce like results ; 
this fact is Law. When we say that the universe is 
governed by law, we mean that this fact, called law, 
is incapable of change ; that it is, has been, and 
forever will be, the same inexorable, immutable 
Fact, inseparable from all phenomena. Law, in this 
sense, was not enacted or made. It could not have 
been otherwise than as it is. That which necessarily 
exists has no creator. 



WHAT IS BLASPHEMY ? 




live on the unpaid labor of others. 
To enslave the bodies of men. 
To build dungeons for the soul. 
To frighten babes with the threat of 
eternal fire. 

To appeal from reason to brute 
force, — from principle to prejudice, — from justice to 
hatred. 

To answer argument with calumny. 

To beat wives and children. 

To reward hypocrisy. 

To persecute for opinion's sake. 

To add to the sum of human misery. 

He who hates, blasphemes. 



SOME REASONS. 




OPPOSE the Church because she is the 
enemy of liberty ; because her dogmas are 
infamous and cruel; because she humiliates 
and degrades women ; because she teaches 
the doctrines of eternal torment and the 
natural depravity of man ; because she 
insists upon the absurd, the impossible, and the sense- 
less ; because she resorts to falsehood and slander ; 
because she is arrogant and revengeful ; because she 
allows men to sin on a credit ; because she discourages 
self-reliance, and laughs at good works ; because she 
believes in vicarious virtue and vicarious vice — 
vicarious punishment and vicarious reward ; because 
she regards repentance of more importance than resti- 
tution, and because she sacrifices the world we have 
to one we know not of. 

The free and generous, the tender and affectionate, 
will understand me. Those who have escaped from 
the grated cells of a creed will appreciate my motives. 
The sad and suffering wives, the trembling and loving 
children will thank me : This is enough. 



SKLKCTIONS. 



THE HOLY TRINITY. 




EASON, Observation and Experience — 
the Holy Trinity of Science — have taught 
us that happiness is the only good ; that 
the time to be happy is now, and the way 
to be happy is to make others so. This 
is enough for us. In this belief we are 
content to live and die. If by any possibility the ex- 
istence of a power superior to, and independent of, 
nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time 
enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect. 

Compared with Shakespeare's " book and volume 
of the brain," the " sacred " bible shrinks and seems 
as feebly impotent and vain as would a pipe of Pan 
when some great organ, voiced with every tone, 
from the hoarse thunder of the sea to the winged 
warble of a mated bird, fills and floods cathedral 
aisles with all the wealth of sound. 



254 SELECTIONS. 

It is not essential to conjugate the Greek verbs 
before making up your mind as to the probability of 
dead people getting out of their graves. 

When a fact can be demonstrated force is un- 
necessary ; when it cannot be demonstrated, force is 
infamous. 

Every church member bears the marks of collar, 
chain and whip. 

Where industry creates, and justice protects, 
prosperity dwells. 

" Blasphemy " is what a last year's leaf says to 
a this year's bud. 

Every flower about a house certifies to the refine- 
ment of somebody. 

The church has already reduced Spain to a guitar, 
Italy to a hand-organ, and Ireland to exile. 

Our ignorance is God ; what we know is science. 

A mortgage casts a shadow on the sunniest field. 

A first cause is just as impossible as a last effect. 



SELECTIONS. 



255 



The combined wisdom and genius of mankind 
cannot conceive of an argument against the liberty 
of thought. 

I believe in the democracy of the family. If in 
this world there is anything splendid, it is a home 
where all are equals. 

One drop of water is as wonderful as all the seas ; 
one leaf as all the forests, and one grain of sand as 
all the stars. 

" Heretic " is an epithet used in the place of 
argument. 

Side by side across the open bible lie the sword 
and fagot. 

The spirit of worship is the spirit of tyranny. The 
intellect has no knees. 

The first doubt was the womb and cradle of 
progress. 

The people in all ages have crucified and glorified. 

The church has built more prisons than asylums. 

Whoever worships, abdicates. 



256 SELECTIONS. 

We do not know, we cannot say, whether death 
is a wall, or a door ; the beginning or end, of a day ; 
the spreading of pinions to soar, or the folding forever 
of wings ; the rise or the set of a sun, or an endless 
life, that brings the rapture of love to every one. 

The roof tree is sacred, from the smallest fibre 
that feels the soft cool clasp of earth, to the topmost 
flower that spreads its bosom to the sun, and like a 
spendthrift gives its perfume to the air. 

Those who have climbed highest on the shining 
ladder of fame commenced at the lowest round. 

Superstition is the upas tree, in whose shade 
the intellect of man has withered. 

Every creed is a rock in running water. Humanity 
sweeps by it. 

The church has furnished murderers for its own 
martyrs. 

The prodigality of the rich is the providence of 
the poor. 

The best form of charity is extravagance. 

Meekness is the mask of malice. 



SELECTIONS. 257 

Better rot in the windowless tomb, to which there 
is no door but the red mouth of the pallid worm, 
than wear the jeweled collar even of a god. 

If we are the children of God, he furnished us 
with imperfect minds, and has no right to demand a 
perfect result. 

It is a terrible thing to wake up at night, when 
you are sleeping alone, and be compelled to say, 
There's a rascal in this bed. 

The little ghosts fled at the first appearance of the 
dawn, and the great one will vanish with the perfect 
day. 

If honest convictions were contagious, more 
people would have them. 

Superstition is the mother of those hideous 
twins, fear and faith. 

Under the loftiest monument sleeps the dust of 
murder. 

Intellectual disobedience is one of the con- 
ditions of progress. 



258 SELECTIONS. 

Astronomy took its revenge, and not a glittering 
star in all the vast expanse now bears a Christian 
name. 

The home where virtue dwells with love is like a 
lily with a heart of fire — the fairest flower in all the 
world. 

Religious persecution springs from a due ad- 
mixture of love toward God and hatred toward man. 

Even intelligent self-love embraces within its 
mighty arms all the human race. 

The civilization of man increases as the secular 
power of the church decreases. 

The present is the necessary child of all the past. 
There has been no chance, there can be no interference. 

It is more important to love your wife, than to 
love God. 

Worship is a bribe that fear offers to power. 
Imposture has always worn a crown. 
Fear is the dungeon of the mind. 



SELECTIONS. 259 

In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put 
crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings. 

Why should the church show mercy to a noble 
heretic whom her God is impatient to burn in eternal 
fire? 

Reformation has always been regarded as 
treason. 

All facts are simply the different aspects of the 
one fact. 

To obey is slavish, but to act from a sense of 
obligation perceived by the reason, is noble. 

Every church is a cemetery and every creed an 
epitaph. 

Superstition is the Gorgon beneath whose gaze 
the human heart has turned to stone. 

Wherever the bravest blood has been shed the 
sword of the church has been wet. 

Logic was not buried with the dead languages. 

Faith is a lullaby sung to put the soul to sleep. 



260 SELECTIONS. 

The idea that God wants blood is at the bottom 
of the atonement, and rests upon the most fearful 
savagery. The greater the crime, the greater the 
sacrifice ; the more blood the greater the atonement. 

If the people were a little more ignorant, as- 
trology would flourish ; if a little more enlightened, 
religion would perish. 

The orthodox church will never forgive the Uni- 
versalist for saying, " God is love." 

The science by which they demonstrate the im- 
possible, is theology. 

Theologians have exhausted ingenuity in finding 
excuses for God. 

Many of the intellectual giants of the world have 
been nursed at the sad and loving breast of poverty. 

There can be but little liberty on earth while men 
worship a tyrant in heaven. 

Astronomy was the first help that man received 
from heaven. 

All religions are inconsistent with mental freedom. 



SELECTIONS. 26l 

Interest eats day and night, and the more it eats 
the hungrier it grows. The farmer in debt, lying 
awake at night, can, if he listens, hear it gnaw. If he 
owes nothing, he can hear the corn grow. 

Is a God who will burn a soul forever in another 
world, better than a Christian who burns a body for a 
few hours in this ? 

Few men have been patriotic enough to shoulder 
a musket in defence of a boarding-house. 

If Christianity be true, there is but one little, 
narrow, grass-grown path that leads to heaven. 

To worship another is to degrade yourself. Wor- 
ship is awe and dread, and vague fear and blind hope. 

Man in his helplessness has, by prayer and sacri- 
fice, endeavored to soften the heart of God. 

Every nerve in the human body has been sought 
out and touched, by the church. 

The sciences are not sirens luring souls to eternal 
wreck. 

A blow from a parent leaves a scar on the soul. 



262 SELECTIONS. 

Perhaps. — It may be that the fabric of our civili- 
zation will crumbling fall to unmeaning chaos and to 
formless dust, where oblivion broods and memory 
forgets. Perhaps the blind Samson of some im- 
prisoned force, released by thoughtless chance, may 
so wreck and strand the world that man, in stress and 
strain of want and fear, will shudderingly crawl back 
to savage and barbaric night. The time may come 
in which this thrilled and throbbing earth, shorn of 
all life, will in its soundless orbit wheel a barren star, 
on which the light will fall as fruitlessly as falls the 
gaze of love upon the cold, pathetic face of death. 

Right and Wrong. — What is right and what 
is wrong? Everything is right that tends to the 
happiness of mankind, and everything is wrong that 
increases the sum of human misery. What can in- 
crease the happiness of this world more than to do 
away with every form of slavery, and with all war ? 
What can increase the misery of mankind more than 
to increase wars and put chains upon more human 
limbs ? What is conscience ? If man were incapable 
of suffering, if man could not feel pain, the word 
" conscience" never would have passed his lips. 



SELECTIONS. 263 

Immortality. — The idea of immortality, that like 
a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with 
its countless waves of hope and fear beating against the 
shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any 
book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was 
born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and 
flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and dark- 
ness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is 
the rainbow — Hope, shining upon the tears of grief. 

The Soldiers. — The soldiers of the Republic did 
not wage a war of extermination. They did not seek 
to enslave their fellow-men. They did not murder 
trembling age. They did not sheathe their swords 
in women's breasts. They gave the old men bread, 
and let the mothers rock their babes in peace. They 
fought to save the world's great hope — to free a race 
and put the humblest hut beneath the canopy of liberty 
and law. 

Intellectual Capital. — Logic is not satisfied 
with assertion. It cares nothing for the opinions of 
the " great," — nothing for the prejudices of the many, 
and least of all for the superstitions of the dead. In 
the world of Science, a fact is a legal tender. Asser- 



264 SELECTIONS. 

tions and miracles are base and spurious coins. We 
have the right to rejudge the justice even of a god. 
No one should throw away his reason — the fruit of 
all experience. It is the intellectual capital of the 
soul, the only light, the only guide, and without it the 
brain becomes the palace of an idiot king, attended by 
a retinue of thieves and hypocrites. 

Life. — We live on an atom called Earth, and 
what we know of the infinite is almost infinitely 
limited ; but, little as we know, all have an equal right 
to give their honest thought. Life is a shadowy, 
strange, and winding road on which we travel for a 
little way — a few short steps — just from the cradle, 
with its lullaby of love, to the low and quiet way-side 
inn, where all at last must sleep, and where the only 
salutation is — Good night 

Fear paralyzes the brain. Progress is born of 
courage. Fear believes — courage doubts. Fear 
falls upon the earth and prays — courage stands erect 
and thinks. Fear retreats — courage advances. Fear 
is barbarism — courage is civilization. Fear believes 
in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion 
— courage is science. 



SELECTIONS. 265 

Autumn.— -The withered banners of the corn are 
still, and gathered fields are growing strangely wan, 
while death, poetic death, with hands that color what 
they touch, weaves in the autumn wood its tapestries 
of brown and gold. 

Had the 109th Psalm been found in a temple 
erected for the worship of snakes, or in the possession 
of some cannibal king, written with blood upon the 
dried skins of butchered babes, there would have been 
a perfect harmony between its surroundings and its 
sentiments. 

A Being of infinite wisdom has no right to create 
a person destined to everlasting pain. For the honest 
infidel, according to orthodox Christianity, there is no 
heaven. For the upright atheist, there is nothing in 
another world but punishment Christians admit that 
lunatics and idiots are in no danger of hell. This be- 
ing so, God should have created only lunatics and 
idiots. Why should the fatal gift of brain be given to 
any human being, if such gift renders him liable to 
eternal hell ? Better be a lunatic here and an angel 
there. Better be an idiot in this world, if you can be 
a seraph in the next. 



266 SELECTIONS. 

If it is our duty to forgive our enemies, ought not 
God to forgive his ? Is it possible that God will hate 
his enemies when he tells us that we must love ours ? 
The enemies of God cannot injure him, but ours can 
injure us. If it is the duty of the injured to forgive, 
why should the uninjured insist upon having revenge? 
Why should a being who destroys nations with pesti- 
lence and famine expect that his children will be loving 
and forgiving? 

Like other religions, Christianity is a mixture of 
good and evil. The church has made more orphans 
than it has fed. It has never built asylums enough 
to hold the insane of its own making. It has shed 
more blood than light. 

Growth is heresy. Heresy is the eternal dawn. 
It is the best thought. Heresy is the perpetually new 
world, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all 
sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy 
extends the hospitality of the brain to a new thought. 

The throne and altar are twins, vultures from the 
same egg. 



SELECTIONS. 267 

At Bay. — Sometimes in the darkness of night I 
feel as though surrounded by the great armies of 
effacement — that the horizon is growing smaller 
every moment — that the final surrender is only post- 
poned — that everything is taking something from 
me — that Nature robs me with her countless hands 
— that my heart grows weaker with every beat — that 
even kisses wear me away, and that my every thought 
takes toll of my brief life. 

Give me the storm and tempest of thought and 
action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and 
faith. Banish me from Eden when you will, but 
first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. 

It seems to me that the doctrine of the atonement 
is absurd, unjust and immoral. Can a law be satisfied 
by the execution of the wrong person ? When a man 
commits a crime, the law demands his punishment, 
not that of a substitute ; and there can be no law, 
human or divine, that can be satisfied by the punish- 
ment of a substitute. Can there be a law that demands 
that the guilty be rewarded ? And yet, to reward the 
guilty is far nearer justice than to punish the innocent 



268 SELECTIONS. 

George Eliot. — George Eliot tenderly carried 
in her heart the burdens of our race. She looked 
through pity's tears upon the faults and frailties of 
mankind. She knew the springs and seeds of thought 
and deed, and saw, with cloudless eyes, through all 
the winding ways of greed, ambition and deceit, where 
folly vainly plucks with thorn-pierced hands the fading 
flowers of selfish joy, the highway of eternal right. 
Whatever her relations may have been — no matter 
what I think, or others say, or how much all regret 
the one mistake in all her self-denying, loving life — 
I feel and know that in the court where her own 
conscience sat as judge, she stood acquitted — pure as 
light and stainless as a star. 

Leave her i' the earth : 

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh 

May violets spring ! 

It never can be necessary to throw away your 
reason to save your soul. 

In the presence of eternity the mountains are as 
transient as the clouds. 

Christianity transferred the brutalities of the 
Coliseum to the Inquisition. 



SELECTIONS. 269 

Religion does not and cannot contemplate man 
as free. She accepts only the homage of the prostrate, 
and scorns the offerings of those who stand erect. 
She cannot tolerate the liberty of thought. The wide 
and sunny fields belong not to her domain. The star- 
lit heights of genius and individuality are above and 
beyond her appreciation and power. Her subjects 
cringe at her feet, covered with the dust of obedience. 
They are not athletes standing posed by rich life and 
brave endeavor like antique statues, but shriveled de- 
formities studying with furtive glance the cruel face 
of power. 

I want no heaven for which I must give up my 
reason, no happiness in exchange for my liberty, and 
no immortality that demands the surrender of my 
individuality. 

Hypocrisy and tyranny — two vultures — have fed 
upon the liberties of man. 

To plow is to pray ; to plant is to prophesy, and 
the harvest answers and fulfills. 

No man with any sense of humor, ever founded a 
religion. 



270 SELECTIONS. 

Arguments cannot be answered with insults. 
Kindness is strength. Anger blows out the lamp of 
the mind. In the examination of great questions every- 
one should be serene, slow-pulsed and calm. Intelli- 
gence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence 
is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice. 
Candor is the courage of the soul. 

If you have but one dollar in the world, and have 
to spend it, spend it like a king ; spend it as though 
it were a dried leaf and you were the owner of un- 
bounded forests. 

God, in his infinite justice, damns a good man on 
his own merits, and saves a bad man on the merits 
of another. 

The church has been a charitable highwayman, a 
profligate beggar, a generous pirate. 

Is it possible that Christ is less forgiving in heaven 
than he was in Jerusalem ? 

Wives weary and worn, mothers wrinkled and 
bent, fill homes with grief. 

The church is the stone of the sepulchre of liberty. 



SELECTIONS. 27 1 

Across the highway of progress, the church has 
always been building breast-works of bibles, tracts, 
commentaries, prayer-books, creeds, dogmas and 
platforms ; and at every advance, the Christians have 
gathered behind these heaps of rubbish and shot the 
poisoned arrows of malice at the soldiers of freedom. 

It is not necessary to understand Hebrew, in order 
to know that cruelty is not a virtue, that murder is in- 
consistent with infinite goodness, and that eternal 
punishment can be inflicted upon man only by an 
eternal fiend. 

Every member of a church, with a creed, like a 
club in his hand, stands guard over the brain of the 
minister. 

Industry is crippled, honest toil is robbed, and 
even beggary is taxed, to defray the expenses of 
Christian war. 

Why should a Christian believe in religious tolera- 
tion and yet worship a God who does not ? 

The school-house is my cathedral. 



272 SELECTIONS. 

Down, forever down, with any religion that re- 
quires upon its ignorant altar the sacrifice of the 
goddess Reason ; that compels her to abdicate the 
shining throne of the soul ; strips from her form the 
imperial purple ; snatches from her hand the sceptre 
of thought, and makes her the bond-woman of a 
senseless faith. 

Superstition is a hydra-headed monster, reach- 
ing in terrible coils from the heavens, and thrusting 
its thousand fangs into the bleeding, quivering hearts 
of men. 

Whatever the attitude of the body, the brave 
soul is always found erect. 

Once the cross and rack were inseparable com- 
panions. 

There are in nature neither rewards nor punish- 
ments ; there are consequences. 

Without liberty, the brain is a dungeon and the 
soul a convict. 

Every science has been an outcast 



SELECTIONS. 273 

The originality of repetition, and the mental vigor 
of acquiescence, are all that we have a right to expect 
from the Christian world. 

In Love's fair realm husband and wife are king 
and queen, sceptred and crowned alike and seated on 
the self-same throne. 

Let the ghosts go ; let them cover their eyeless 
sockets with their fleshless hands and fade forever 
from the imagination of men. 

Will the agony of the damned increase or 
decrease the happiness of God ? 

The weakest man in the world can make as much 
out of " nothing," as God. 

Blasphemy marks the point where argument 
stops and slander begins. 

If I rob Mr. Smith, and God forgives me, how 
does that help Smith ? 

To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million 
prayers. 

In love and liberty, extravagance is economy. 



274 SELECTIONS. 

There is a quiet about the life of a farmer, and 
the hope of a serene old age, that no other business 
or profession can promise. A professional man is 
doomed, some time, to find that his powers are want- 
ing. He is doomed to see younger and stronger men 
pass him in the race of life. He looks forward to an 
old age of intellectual mediocrity. He will be last, 
where once he was first. But the farmer goes into 
partnership with Nature. He lives with trees and 
flowers. He breathes the sweet air of the fields. 
There is no constant and frightful strain upon his 
mind. His nights are filled with sleep and rest. He 
watches his flocks and herds as they feed upon the 
green and sunny slopes. He hears the pleasant rain 
falling upon the waving corn, and the trees he planted 
in his youth rustle above him as he plants others for 
the children yet to be. 

Suppose the Church could control the world to- 
day ? We would go back to chaos and old night 
Philosophy would be branded as infamous. Science 
would again press its pale and thoughtful face against 
the prison bars. Around the limbs of Liberty would 
climb and leap the bigot's flame. 



SELECTIONS. 275 

All laws defining and punishing blasphemy, 
making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the 
bible, to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, 
or express your real opinion of their Jehovah, were 
passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once 
repealed by honest men. 

It seems to me that a belief in the great truths of 
science is fully as essential to salvation as the creed 
of any church. 

Abject faith is barbarism. Reason is civiliza- 
tion. To obey is slavish. To act from a sense of 
obligation perceived by the reason, is noble. Igno- 
rance worships mystery ; Reason explains it. The 
one grovels ; the other soars. 

The first grave was the first cathedral. The first 
corpse was the first priest ; and when the last priest 
is one, the world will be free. 

No man worthy of the form he bears will, at the 
command of Church or State, solemnly repeat a creed 
his reason scorns. 



276 SELECTIONS. 

The Bible the Work of Man. — Is it not infi- 
nitely more reasonable to say that this book is the 
work of man — that it is filled with mingled truth and 
error, with mistakes and facts, and reflects, too faith- 
fully perhaps, "the very form and pressure of its 
time?" If there are mistakes in the bible, certainly 
they were made by man. If there is anything con- 
trary to nature, it was written by man. If there is 
anything immoral, cruel, heartless, or infamous, it 
certainly was not written by a being worthy of the 
adoration of mankind. 

I do not see how it is possible for a man to die 
worth millions of dollars in a city full of pain, where 
every day he sees the withered hand of want and the 
white lips of famine ! I do not see how he can do it, 
any more than he could keep a pile of lumber on the 
shore, where hundreds and thousands were drowning 
in the sea. 

In the long run, the nation that is honest, the 
people that are industrious, will pass the people that 
are dishonest, the people that are idle — no matter 
what grand ancestry they may have had. 



SELECTIONS. 277 

Give us One Fact. — We have heard talk enough. 
We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid 
sermons that we wish to hear. ' e have read your 
bible, and the works of your beet minds. We have 
heard your prayers, your solemn groans, and your 
reverential amens. All these amount to less than 
nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors 
of your churches for just one little fact. We pass 
our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and 
implore you for just one fact. We know all about 
your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We 
want a this-year's-fact. We ask only one. Give 
us one fact, for charity. Your miracles are too 
ancient. 

The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to 
law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here. 
The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to 
miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery 
hereafter. The few have said, Think ! The many 
have said, Believe ! 

" Come let us reason together, saith the Lord." I 
accept the invitation. 



278 SELECTIONS. 

A Day for the Poor. — A poor mechanic, 
working all the week in dust and noise, needs a day 
of rest and joy — a day to visit stream and wood — a 
day to live with wife and child — a day in which to 
laugh at care and gather strength for toils to come. 
And his weary wife needs a breath of sunny air, 
away from street and wall, amid the hills, or by the 
margin of the sea, where she can sit and prattle with 
her babe and fill with happy dreams the long, glad 
day. 

When every church becomes a school, every 
cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, 
and all the hearers brave and honest thinkers, the 
dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher 
will become a great and splendid reality. 

It is better to be the emperor of one loving and 
tender heart — and she the empress of yours — than 
to be the emperor of the world. 

There is nothing grander than to rescue from the 
leprosy of slander the reputation of a great and 
splendid man. 



SELECTIONS. 279 

Civilization is the child of free thought. The 
New World has drifted away from the rotten wharf 
of superstition. The politics of this country are 
being settled by the new ideas of intellectual liberty. 
Parties and churches that cannot accept the new 
truths, must perish. 

Our country will never be filled with great insti- 
tutions of learning until there is an absolute divorce 
between church and school. As long as the mutilated 
records of a barbarous people are placed by priest 
and professor above the reason of mankind, we shall 
reap but little benefit from church or school. 

I have been in other countries and have said to 
myself, " After all, my country is the best." And 
when I came back to the sea and saw the old flag 
flying, it seemed as though the air, from pure joy, 
had burst into blossom. 

I am in favor of the taxation of all church property. 
If that property belongs to God, he is able to pay the 
tax. If we exempt anything, let us exempt the homes 
of the widow and the orphan. 



280 SELECTIONS. 

Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. — This sound- 
wrought picture of the fields and woods, of flowering 
hedge and happy home, where thrushes build and 
swallows fly, and mothers sing to babes ; this echo of 
the babbled lullaby of brooks that, dallying, wind and 
fall where meadows bare their daisied bosoms to the 
sun ; this joyous mimicry of summer rain, the laugh 
of children, and the rhythmic rustle of the whispering 
leaves ; this strophe of peasant life ; this perfect poem 
of content and love. 

Every religion has for its foundation a miracle — 
that is to say, a violation of nature — that is to say, a 
falsehood. 

To work for others is, in reality, the only way in 
which a man can work for himself. Selfishness is 
ignorance. 

Out upon the intellectual sea there is room for 
every sail. In the intellectual air there is space 
for every wing. 

Love is the only thing that will pay ten per cent, 
to borrower and lender both. 



SELECTIONS. 28 1 

Gold impoverishes. Only the other day I was 
where they wrench it from the miserly clutch of the 
rocks. When I saw the mountains treeless, shrubless, 
flowerless — without even a spire of grass — it seemed 
to me that gold has the same effect upon the soil that 
holds it, as upon the man who lives and labors only 
for it. It affects the land as it does the man. It 
leaves the heart barren, without a flower of kindness, 
without a blossom of pity. 

Science makes friends, religion makes enemies. 
The one enriches, the other impoverishes. The one 
thrives best where the truth is told, the other where 
falsehoods are believed. 

Rome was far better when Pagan than when 
Catholic. It was better to allow gladiators and crim- 
inals to fight, than to burn honest men. 

A believer is a bird in a cage. A freethinker 
is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing. 

A creed is the ignorant past bullying the en- 
lightened present. 

Happiness is the legal-tender of the soul. 



282 SELECTIONS. 

A government founded upon anything except 
liberty can not and ought not to stand. All the 
wrecks on either shore of the stream of time — all the 
wrecks of cities and nations, are a warning that no 
nation founded upon slavery can live. From sand- 
enshrouded Egypt, from the marble wilderness of 
Athens, from every fallen, crumbling stone of mighty 
Rome, comes a wail — a cry: " No nation founded on 
slavery, can stand." 

Orthodox ministers sit like owls on the dead 
limbs of the tree of knowledge, and hoot the same old 
hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred 
years. 

Every human being should take a road of his 
own. Every mind should be true to itself — should 
think, investigate, and conclude for itself. This is 
the duty alike of pauper and prince. 

Man stands with his back to the sunrise and 
mistakes his shadow for God. 

We go as far as we can, and the rest of the way 
we say is — God. 



SELECTIONS. 283 

I like to hear children at the table telling what 
big things they have seen during the day. I like to 
hear their merry voices mingling with the clatter of 
knives and forks. I had rather hear that, than any 
opera that was ever put upon the stage. 

Every day something happens to show me that 
the old spirit of the inquisition still slumbers in the 
Christian breast. 

I want to see the time when every man, woman, 
and child will enjoy every human right. 

The Church is, and always has been, incapable 
of a forward movement. Religion always looks 
back. 

A lie will not fit a fact ; it will only fit another lie 
made for the purpose. 

Keep your word with your child the same as you 
would with your banker. 

Science will put another "o" in God, and take 
a "d" from Devil. 



LOVE. 




OVE is the only bow on life's dark cloud. 
It is the morning and the evening star. It 
shines upon the babe, and sheds its 
radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the 
mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and 
philosopher. It is the air and light of 
every heart — builder of every home, kindler of every 
fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of 
immortality. It fills the world with melody — for 
music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the 
enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and 
makes right royal kings and queens of common clay. 
It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, 
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, 
we are less than beasts ; but v/ith it, earth is heaven, 
and we are gods. 



ORIGIN AND DESTINY. 




S a matter of fact, the questions of origin 
and destiny are beyond the grasp of the 
human mind. We can see a certain 
distance ; beyond that everything is in- 
distinct; and beyond the indistinct is 
the unseen. In the presence of these 
mysteries — and everything is a mystery so far as 
origin, destiny, and nature are concerned — the intelli- 
gent, honest man is compelled to say : " I do not 
know." 

In the great midnight a few truths, like stars, shine 
on forever — and from the brain of man come a few 
struggling gleams of light — a few momentary sparks. 
Some have contended that everything is spirit ; 
others, that everything is matter ; and again others, 
that a part is matter and a part is spirit ; some, 
that spirit was first and matter after; others, that 
matter was first and spirit after, and others that 
matter and spirit have existed together. 



286 ORIGIN AND DESTINY. 

But none of these people can by any possibility 
tell what matter is, or what spirit is, or what the 
difference is between spirit and matter. 

The materialists look upon the spiritualists as sub- 
stantially insane ; and the spiritualists regard the 
materialists as low and groveling. These spiritual- 
istic people hold matter in contempt ; but, after all, 
matter is quite a mystery. You take in your hand a 
little earth — a little dust. Do you know what it is ? 
In this dust you put a seed ; the rain falls upon it ; 
the light strikes it ; the seed grows ; it bursts into 
blossom ; it produces fruit. 

What is this dust — -this womb ? Do you under- 
stand it ? Is there anything in the wide universe 
more wonderful than this ? 

Take a grain of sand, reduce it to powder, take 
the smallest possible particle, look at it with a micro- 
scope, contemplate its every part for days, and it 
remains the citadel of a secret — an impregnable for- 
tress. Bring all the theologians, philosophers, and 
scientists in serried ranks against it ; let them attack 
on every side with all the arts and arms of thought 
and force. The citadel does not fall. Over the 
battlements floats the flag, and the victorious secret 
smiles at the baffled hosts. 



LIFE 




lORN of love and hope, of ecstacy and 
pain, of agony and fear, of tears and joy 
— dowered with the wealth of two united 
hearts — held in happy arms, with lips 
upon life's drifted font, blue-veined and 
fair, where perfect peace finds perfect 
form — rocked by willing feet and wooed to shadowy 
shores of sleep by siren mother singing soft and low 
—looking with wonderV wide and startled eyes at 
common things of life and day — taught by want and 
wish and contact with the things that touch the 
dimpled flesh of babes — lured by light and flame, and 
charmed by color's wondrous robes — learning the 
use of hands and feet, and by the love of mimicry 
beguiled to utter speech — releasing prisoned thoughts 
from crabbed and curious marks on soiled and tattered 
leaves — puzzling the brain with crooked numbers 



288 LIFE. 

and their changing, tangled worth — and so through 
years of alternating day and night, until the captive 
grows familiar with the chains and walls and limita- 
tions of a life. 

And time runs on in sun and shade, until the one 
of all the world is wooed and won, and all the lore of 
love is taught and learned again. Again a home is 
built with the fair chamber wherein faint dreams, like 
cool and shadowy vales, divide the billowed hours of 
love. Again the miracle of a birth — the pain and 
joy, the kiss of welcome and the cradle-song drown- 
ing the drowsy prattle of a babe. 

And then the sense of obligation and of wrong — 
pity for those who toil and weep — tears for the 
imprisoned and despised— love for the generous dead, 
and in the heart the rapture of a high resolve. 

And then ambition, with its lust of pelf and place 
and power, longing to put upon its breast distinc- 
tion's worthless badge. Then keener thoughts of 
men, and eyes that see behind the smiling mask of 
craft — flattered no more by the obsequious cringe of 
gain and greed — knowing the uselessness of hoarded 
gold — of honor bought from those who charge the 
usury of self-respect — of power that only bends a 



LIFE. 289 

coward's knees and forces from the lips of fear the 
lies of praise. Knowing at last the unstudied gesture 
of esteem, the reverent eyes made rich with honest 
thought, and holding high above all other things — 
high as hope's great throbbing star above the dark- 
ness of the dead— the love of wife and child and 
friend. 

Then locks of gray, and growing love of other 
days and half- remembered things — then holding 
withered hands of those who first held his, while over 
dim and loving eyes death softly presses down the 
lids of rest. 

And so, locking in marriage vows his children's 
hands and crossing others on the breasts of peace, 
with daughters' babes upon his knees, the white 
hair mingling with the gold, he journeys on from day 
to day to that horizon where the dusk is waiting for 
the night. — At last, sitting by the holy hearth of 
home as evenings' embers change from red to gray, 
he falls asleep within the arms of her he worshipped 
and adored, feeling upon his pallid lips love's last 
and holiest kiss. 






THE BIRTHPLACE OF BURNS. 



Though Scotland boasts a thousand names 

Of patriot, king and peer, 
The noblest, grandest of them all 

Was loved and cradled here : 
Here lived the gentle peasant-prince, 

The loving cotter-king, 
Compared with whom the greatest lord 

Is but a titled thing. 

Tis but a cot roofed in with straw, 

A hovel made of clay ; 
One door shuts out the snow and storm, 

One window greets the day : 
And yet I stand within this room 

And hold all thrones in scorn ; 
For here, beneath this lowly thatch, 

Love's sweetest bard was born. 

Within this hallowed hut I feel 

Like one who clasps a shrine, 
When the glad lips at last have touched 

The something deemed divine. 
And here the world through all the years, 

As long as day returns, 
The tribute of its love and tears 

Will pay to Robert Burns. 

Ayr, August ip, 1878. (290) 






TRIBUTE TO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 




ENRY WARD BEECHER was born in 
a Puritan penitentiary, of which his father 
was one of the wardens — a prison with 
very narrow and closely-grated windows. 
Under its walls were the rayless, hopeless 
and measureless dungeons of the damned, 
and on its roof fell the shadow of God's eternal frown. 
In this prison the creed and catechism were primers 
for children, and from a pure sense of duty their 
loving hearts were stained and scarred with the 
religion of John Calvin. 

In those days the home of an orthodox minister 
was an inquisition in which babes were tortured 
for the good of their souls. Children then, as now, 
rebelled against the infamous absurdities and cruelties 
of the creed. No Calvinist was ever able, unless 
with blows, to answer the questions of his child. 
Children were raised in what was called " the nurture 



292 A TRIBUTE. 

and admonition of the Lord" — that is to say, their 
wills were broken or subdued, their natures were de- 
formed and dwarfed, their desires defeated or destroy- 
ed, and their development arrested or perverted. 
Life was robbed of its Spring, its Summer and its 
Autumn. Children stepped from the cradle into the 
snow. No laughter, no sunshine, no joyous, free, un- 
burdened days. God, an infinite detective, watched 
them from above, and Satan, with malicious leer, 
was waiting for their souls below. Between these 
monsters life was passed. Infinite consequences were 
predicated of the smallest action, and a burden greater 
than a God could bear was placed upon the heart and 
brain of every child. To think, to ask questions, to 
doubt, to investigate, were acts of rebellion. To 
express pity for the lost, writhing in the dungeons 
below, was simply to give evidence that the enemy 
of souls had been at work within their hearts. 

Among all the religions of this world — from the 
creed of cannibals who devoured flesh, to that of Cal- 
vinists who polluted souls — there is none, there has 
been none, there will be none, more utterly heartless 
and inhuman than was the orthodox Congregational- 
ism of New England in the year of grace 1813. It 



A TRIBUTE. 293 

despised every natural joy, hated pictures, abhorred 
statues as lewd and lustful things, execrated music, 
regarded nature as fallen and corrupt, man as totally 
depraved and woman as somewhat worse. The 
theatre was the vestibule of perdition, actors the ser- 
vants of Satan, and Shakespeare a trifling wretch, 
whose words were seeds of death. And yet the 
virtues found a welcome, cordial and sincere; duty 
was done as understood; obligations were discharged; 
truth was told ; self-denial was practised for the sake 
of others, and many hearts were good and true in 
spite of book and creed. 

In this atmosphere of theological miasma, in this 
hideous dream of superstition, in this penitentiary, 
moral and austere, this babe first saw the imprisoned 
gloom. The natural desires ungratified, the laughter 
suppressed, the logic brow-beaten by authority, the 
humor frozen by fear — of many generations — were 
in this child, a child destined to rend and wreck the 
prison's walls. 

Through the grated windows of his cell, this child, 
this boy, this man, caught glimpses of the outer world, 
of fields and skies. New thoughts were in his brain, 
new hopes within his heart. Another heaven bent 



294 A TRIBUTE. 

above his life. There came a revelation of the 
beautiful and real. Theology grew mean and small. 
Nature wooed and won and saved this mighty soul. 

Her countless hands were sowing seeds within 
his tropic brain. All sights and sounds — all colors, 
forms and fragments — were stored within the treasury 
of his mind. His thoughts were moulded by the 
graceful curves of streams, by winding paths in 
woods, the charm of quiet country roads, and 
lanes grown indistinct with weeds and grass — by 
vines that cling anc 4 hide with leaf and flower the 
crumbling wall's decay — by cattle standing in the 
summer pools like statues of content. 

There was within his words the subtle spirit of the 
season's change — of everything that is, of every- 
thing that lies between the slumbering seeds, that, 
half-awakened by the April rain, have dreams of 
heaven's blue, and feel the amorous kisses of the 
sun, and that strange tomb wherein the alchemist 
doth give to death's cold dust the throb and thrill of 
life again. He saw with loving eyes the willows of 
the meadow-streams grow red beneath the glance 
of Spring — the grass along the marsh's edge — the 
stir of life beneath the withered leaves — the moss 



A TRIBUTE. 295 

below the drip of snow — the flowers that give their 
bosoms to the first south wind that wooes — the sad 
and timid violets that only bear the gaze of love from 
eyes half closed — the ferns, where fancy gives a 
thousand forms with but a single plan — the green 
and sunny slopes enriched with daisy's silver and 
the cowslip's gold. 

As in the leafless woods some tree, aflame with 
life, stands like a rapt poet in the heedless crowd, so 
stood this man among his fellow-men. 

All there is of leaf and bud, of flower and fruit, 
of painted insect life, and all the winged and happy 
children of the air that Summer holds beneath her 
dome of blue, were known and loved by him. 
He loved the yellow Autumn fields, the golden 
stacks, the happy homes of men, the orchard's bending 
boughs, the sumach's flags of flame, the maples with 
transfigured leaves, the tender yellow of the beech, the 
wondrous harmonies of brown and gold — the vines 
where hang the clustered spheres of wit and mirth. 
He loved the winter days, the whirl and drift of 
snow — all forms of frost — the rage and furv of the 

o J 

storm, when in the forest, desolate and stripped, the 
brave old pine towers green and grand ■ — a prophecy 



296 A TRIBUTE. 

of Spring. He heard the rhythmic sounds of Nature's 
busy strife, the hum of bees, the songs of birds, the 
eagle's cry, the murmur of the streams, the sighs and 
lamentations of the winds, and all the voices of the 
sea. He loved the shores, the vales, the crags and 
cliffs, the city's busy streets, the introspective, silent 
plain, the solemn splendors of the night, the silver 
sea of dawn, and evening's clouds of molten gold. 
The love of Nature freed this loving man. 

One by one the fetters fell; the gratings disappear- 
ed, the sunshine smote the roof, and on the floors of 
stone, light streamed from open doors. He realized 
the darkness and despair, the cruelty and hate, the 
starless blackness of the old, malignant creed. The 
flower of pity grew and blossomed in his heart. 
The selfish " consolation " filled his eyes with tears. 
He saw that what is called the Christian's hope is, that, 
among the countless billions wrecked and lost, a 
meagre few perhaps may reach the eternal shore — 
a hope that, like the desert rain, gives neither leaf nor 
bud — a hope that gives no joy, no peace, to any great 
and loving soul. It is the dust on which the serpent 
feeds that coils in heartless breasts. 

Day by day the wrath and vengeance faded from 
the sky — the Jewish God grew vague and dim — 



A TRIBUTE. 297 

the threats of torture and eternal pain grew vulgar 
and absurd, and all the miracles seemed strangely out 
of place. They clad the Infinite in motley garb, and 
gave to aureoled heads the cap and bells. 

Touched by the pathos of all human life, know- 
ing the shadows that fall on every heart — the thorns 
in every path, the sighs, the sorrows, and the tears 
that lie between a mother s arms and death's embrace 
—this great and gifted man denounced, denied, and 
damned with all his heart the fanged and frightful 
dogma that souls were made to feed the eternal 
hunger — ravenous as famine — of a God's revenge. 

Take out this fearful, fiendish, heartless lie — 
compared with which all other lies are true — and 
the great arch of orthodox religion crumbling falls. 

To the average man the Christian hell and heaven 
are only words. He has no scope of thought. He 
lives but in a dim, impoverished now. To him the 
past is dead— the future still unborn. He occupies 
with downcast eyes that narrow line of barren, shift- 
ing sand that lies between the flowing seas. But 
Genius knows all time. For him the dead all live 
and breathe, and act their countless parts again. All 
human life is in his now, and every moment feels the 
thrill of all to be. 



298 A TRIBUTE. 

No one can overestimate the good accomplished 
by this marvelous, many-sided man. He helped to 
slay the heart-devouring monster of the Christian 
world. He tried to civilize the church, to humanize 
the creeds, to soften pious breasts of stone, to take 
the fear from mothers' hearts, the chains of creed 
from every brain, to put the star of hope in every sky 
and over every grave. Attacked on every side, 
maligned by those who preached the law of love, he 
wavered not, but fought whole-hearted to the end. 

Obstruction is but virtue's foil. From thwarted 
light leaps color's flame. The stream impeded has a 
song. 

He passed from harsh and cruel creeds to that 
serene philosophy that has no place for pride or hate, 
that threatens no revenge, that looks on sin as stum- 
blings of the blind and pities those who fall, knowing 
that in the souls of all there is a sacred yearning for 
the light. He ceased to think of man as some- 
thing thrust upon the world — an exile from some 
other sphere. He felt at last that men are part of 
Nature's self — kindred of all life — the gradual growth 
of countless years ; that all the sacred books were 
helps until outgrown, and all religions, rough and 
devious paths that man has worn with weary feet in 



A TRIBUTE. 299 

sad and painful search for truth and peace. To him 
these paths were wrong, and yet all gave the promise 
of success. He knew that all the streams, no matter 
how they wander, turn and curve amid the hills 
or rocks, or linger in the lakes and pools, must some 
time reach the sea. These views enlarged his soul 
and made him patient with the world, and while the 
wintry snows of age were falling on his head, Spring, 
with all her wealth of bloom, was in his heart. 

The memory of this ample man is now a part of 
Nature's wealth. He battled for the rights of men. 
His heart was with the slave. He stood against the 
selfish greed of millions banded to protect the pirate's 
trade. His voice was for the right when freedom's 
friends were few. He taught the church to think 
and doubt. He did not fear to stand alone. His 
brain took counsel of his heart. To every foe he 
offered reconciliation's hand. He loved this land 
of ours, and added to its glory through the world. 
He was the greatest orator that stood within the 
pulpit's narrow curve. He loved the liberty of speech. 
There was no trace of bigot in his blood. He was a 
brave and generous man. 

With reverent hands, I place this tribute on his 
tomb. 



MRS. IDA WHITING KNOWLES. 




f Y FRIENDS : Again we stand in the 
shadow of the great mystery — a shadow 
as deep and dark as when the tears of 
the first mother fell upon the pallid face 
of her lifeless babe — a mystery that has 
never yet been solved. 
We have met in the presence of the sacred dead, 
to speak a word of praise, of hope, of consolation. 

Another life of love is now a blessed memory — a 
lingering strain of music. 

The loving daughter, the pure and consecrated 
wife, the sincere friend, who with tender faithfulness 
discharged the duties of a life, has reached her 
journey's end. 

A braver, a more serene, a more chivalric spirit — 
clasping the loved and by them clasped — never passed 
from life to enrich the realm of death. No field of war 
ever witnessed greater fortitude, more perfect, smiling 



302 A TRIBUTE. 

courage, than this poor, weak and helpless woman 
displayed upon the bed of pain and death. 

Her life was gentle and her death sublime. She 
loved the good and all the good loved her. 

There is this consolation: she can never suffer 
more ; never feel again the chill of death ; never 
part again from those she loves. Her heart can 
break no more. She has shed her last tear, and 
upon her stainless brow has been set the wondrous 
seal of everlasting peace. 

When the Angel of Death- — the masked and 
voiceless — enters the door of home, there come with 
her all the daughters of Compassion, and of these 
Love and Hope remain forever. 

You are about to take this dear dust home — to 
the home of her girlhood, and to the place that was 
once my home. You will lay her with neighbors 
whom I have loved, and who are now at rest. You 
will lay her where my father sleeps. 

" Lay her i' the earth, 

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh 

May violets spring." 

I never knew, I never met, a braver spirit than 
the one that once inhabited this silent form of dream- 
less clay. 



ART AND MORALITY. 




RT is the highest form of expression, 
and exists for the sake of expression. 
Through art thoughts become visible. 
Back of forms are the desire, the 
longing, the brooding creative instinct, 
the maternity of mind and the passion 
that give pose and swell, outline and color 

Of course there is no such thing as absolute 
beauty or absolute morality. We now clearly per- 
ceive that beauty and conduct are relative. We have 
outgrown the provincialism that thought is back of 
substance, as well as the old Platonic absurdity, that 
ideas existed before the subjects of thought. So far, 
at least, as man is concerned, his thoughts have been 
produced by his surroundings, by the action and inter- 
action of things upon his mind ; and so far as man 
is concerned, things have preceded thoughts. The 



304 ART AND MORALITY. 

impressions that these things make upon us are what 
we know of them. The absolute is beyond the 
human mind. Our knowledge is confined to the 
relations that exist between the totality of things that 
we call the universe, and the effect upon ourselves. 

Actions are deemed right or wrong, according to 
experience and the conclusions of reason. Things 
are beautiful by the relation that certain forms, colors, 
and modes of expression bear to us. At the founda- 
tion of the beautiful will be found the fact of happiness, 
the gratification of the senses, the delight of intellec- 
tual discovery and the surprise and thrill of apprecia- 
tion. That which we call the beautiful, wakens into 
life through the association of ideas, of memories, of 
experiences, of suggestions of pleasure past and the 
perception that the prophesies of the ideal have 
been and will be fulfilled. 

Art cultivates and kindles the imagination, and 
quickens the conscience. It is by imagination that 
we put ourselves in the place of another. When the 
wings of that faculty are folded, the master does not 
put himself in the place of the slave; the tyrant is not 
locked in the dungeon, chained with his victim. The 
inquisitor did not feel the flames that devoured the 



ART AND MORALITY. 305 

martyr. The imaginative man, giving to the beggar, 
gives to himself. Those who feel indignant at the 
perpetration of wrong, feel for the instant that they 
are the victims ; and when they attack the aggressor 
they feel that they are defending themselves. Love 
and pity are the children of the imagination. 

Our fathers read with great approbation the me- 
chanical sermons in rhyme written by Milton, Young 
and Pollok. Those theological poets wrote for the 
purpose of convincing their readers that the mind of 
man is diseased, filled with infirmities, and that poetic 
poultices and plasters tend to purify and strengthen 
the moral nature of the human race. Nothing to the 
true artist, to the real genius, is so contemptible as 
the " medicinal view." 

Poems were written to prove that the practice of 
virtue was an investment for another world, and that 
whoever followed the advice found in those solemn, 
insincere and lugubrious rhymes, although he might 
be exceedingly unhappy in this world, would with 
great certainty be rewarded in the next. These 
writers assumed that there was a kind of relation 
between rhyme and religion, between verse and 
virtue ; and that it was their duty to call the attention 



306 ART AND MORALITY. 

of the world to all the snares and pitfalls of pleasure. 
They wrote with a purpose. They had a distinct 
moral end in view. They had a plan. They were 
missionaries, and their object was to show the world 
how wicked it was and how good they, the writers, 
were. They could not conceive of a man being so 
happy that everything in nature partook of his feeling ; 
that all the birds were singing for him, and singing 
by reason of his joy ; that everything sparkled and 
shone and moved in the glad rhythm of his heart. 
They could not appreciate this feeling. They could 
not think of this joy guiding the artist's hand, seeking 
expression in form and color. They did not look 
upon poems, pictures, and statues as results, as 
children of the brain fathered by sea and sky, by 
flower and star, by love and light. They were not 
moved by gladness. They felt the responsibility of 
perpetual duty. They had a desire to teach, to ser- 
monize, to point out and exaggerate the faults of 
others and to describe the virtues practiced by them- 
selves. Art became a colporteur, a distributer of 
tracts, a mendicant missionary whose highest ambi- 
tion was to suppress all heathen joy. 

Happy people were supposed to have forgotten, 



ART AND MORALITY. 307 

in a reckless moment, duty and responsibility. True 
poetry would call them back to a realization of their 
meanness and their misery. It was the skeleton at 
the feast, the rattle of whose bones had a rhythmic 
sound. It was the forefinger of warning and doom 
held up in the presence of a smile. 

These moral poets taught the " unwelcome truths," 
and by the paths of life put posts on which they 
painted hands pointing at graves. They loved to see 
the pallor on the cheek of youth, while they talked, 
in solemn tones, of age, decrepitude and lifeless clay. 

Before the eyes of love they thrust, with eager 
hands, the skull of death. They crushed the flowers 
beneath their feet and plaited crowns of thorns for 
every brow. 

According to these poets, happiness was incon- 
sistent with virtue. The sense of infinite obligation 
should be perpetually present. They assumed an 
attitude of superiority. They denounced and calum- 
niated the reader. They enjoyed his confusion when 
charged with total depravity. They loved to paint 
the sufferings of the lost, the worthlessness of human 
life, the littleness of mankind, and the beauties of an 
unknown world. They knew but little of the heart. 



308 ART AND MORALITY. 

They did not know that without passion there is no 
virtue, and that the really passionate are the virtuous. 

Art has nothing to do directly with morality or 
immorality. It is its own excuse for being ; it exists 
for itself. 

The artist who endeavors to enforce a lesson, 
becomes a preacher ; and the artist who tries by hint 
and suggestion to enforce the immoral, becomes a 
pander. 

There is an infinite difference between the nude 
and the naked, between the natural and the undressed. 
In the presence of the pure, unconscious nude, nothing 
can be more contemptible than those forms in which 
are the hints and suggestions of drapery, the pre- 
tence of exposure, and the failure to conceal. The 
undressed is vulgar — the nude is pure. 

The old Greek statues, frankly, proudly nude, 
whose free and perfect limbs have never known the 
sacrilege of clothes, were and are as free from taint, 
as pure, as stainless, as the image of the morning 
star trembling in a drop of perfumed dew. 

Morality is the harmony between act and circum- 
stance. It is the melody of conduct. A wonderful 
statue is the melody of proportion. A great picture 



ART AND MORALITY. 309 

is the melody of form and color. A great statue does 
not suggest labor ; it seems to have been created as 
a joy. A great painting suggests no weariness and 
no effort ; the greater, the easier it seems. So a great 
and splendid life seems to have been without effort. 
There is in it no idea of obligation, no idea of respon- 
sibility or of duty. The idea of duty changes to a 
kind of drudgery that which should be, in the perfect 
man, a perfect pleasure. 

The artist, working simply for the sake of enforc- 
ing a moral, becomes a laborer. The freedom of 
genius is lost, and the artist is absorbed in the citizen. 
The soul of the real artist should be moved by this 
melody of proportion as the body is unconsciously 
swayed by the rhythm of a symphony. No one can 
imagine that the great men who chiseled the statues 
of antiquity intended to teach the youth of Greece to 
be obedient to their parents. We cannot believe that 
Michael Angelo painted his grotesque and somewhat 
vulgar " Day of Judgment" for the purpose of reform- 
ing Italian thieves. The subject was in all probability 
selected by his employer, and the treatment was a 
question of art, without the slightest reference to the 
moral effect, even upon priests. We are perfectly 



3IO ART AND MORALITY. 

certain that Corot painted those infinitely poetic land- 
scapes, those cottages, those sad poplars, those leafless 
vines on weather-tinted walls, those quiet pools, those 
contented cattle, those fields flecked with light, over 
which bend the skies, tender as the breast of a mother, 
without once thinking of the ten commandments. 
There is the same difference between moral art and 
the product of true genius, that there is between 
prudery and virtue. 

The novelists who endeavor to enforce what they 
are pleased to call " moral truths," cease to be artists. 
They create two kinds of characters — types and 
caricatures. The first never has lived, and the second 
never will. The real artist produces neither. In his 
pages you will find individuals, natural people, who 
have the contradictions and inconsistencies insepar- 
able from humanity. The great artists " hold the 
mirror up to nature," and this mirror reflects with ab- 
solute accuracy. The moral and the immoral writers 
— that is to say, those who have some object besides 
that of art — use convex or concave mirrors, or those 
with uneven surfaces, and the result is that the images 
are monstrous and deformed. The little novelist and 
the little artist deal either in the impossible or the 



ART AND MORALITY. 311 

exceptional. The men of genius touch the universal. 
Their words and works throb in unison with the 
great ebb and flow of things. They write and work 
for all races and for all time. 

It has been the object of thousands of reformers 
to destroy the passions, to do away with desires ; and 
could this object be accomplished, life would become 
a burden, with but one desire — that is to say, the de- 
sire for extinction. Art in its highest forms increases 
passion, gives tone and color and zest to life. But 
while it increases passion, it refines. It extends the 
horizon. The bare necessities of life constitute a 
prison, a dungeon. Under the influence of art the 
walls expand, the roof rises, and it becomes a temple. 

Art is not a sermon, and the artist is not a 
preacher. Art accomplishes by indirection. The 
beautiful refines. The perfect in art suggests the 
perfect in conduct. The harmony in music teaches, 
without intention, the lesson of proportion in life. 
The bird in his song has no moral purpose, and yet 
the influence is humanizing. The beautiful in nature 
acts through appreciation and sympathy. It does 
not browbeat, neither does it humiliate. It is beauti- 
ful without regard to you. Roses would be unbear- 



312 ART AND MORALITY. 

able if in their red and perfumed hearts were mottoes 
to the effect that bears eat bad boys and that honesty 
is the best policy. 

Art creates an atmosphere in which the proprie- 
ties, the amenities, and the virtues unconsciously 
grow. The rain does not lecture the seed. The 
light does not make rules for the vine and flower. 

The heart is softened by the pathos of the perfect. 

The world is a dictionary of the mind, and in this 
dictionary of things genius discovers analogies, resem- 
blances, and parallels amid opposites, likeness in 
difference, and corroboration in contradiction. Lan- 
guage is but a multitude of pictures. Nearly every 
word is a work of art, a picture represented by a 
sound, and this sound represented by a mark, and 
this mark gives not only the sound, but the picture of 
something in the outward world and the picture of 
something within the mind, and with these words 
which were once pictures, other pictures are made. 

The greatest pictures and the greatest statues, the 
most wonderful and marvelous groups, have been 
painted and chiseled with words. They are as fresh 
to-day as when they fell from human lips. Penelope 
still ravels, weaves, and waits ; Ulysses' bow is bent, 



ART AND MORALITY. 313 

and through the level rings the eager arrow flies. 
Cordelia's tears are falling now. The greatest gallery 
of the world is found in Shakespeare's book. The 
pictures and the marbles of the Vatican and Louvre 
are faded, crumbling things, compared with his, in 
which perfect color gives to perfect form the glow 
and movement of passion's highest life. 

Everything except the truth wears, and needs to 
wear, a mask. Little souls are ashamed of nature. 
Prudery pretends to have only those passions that 
it cannot feel. Moral poetry is like a respectable 
canal that never overflows its banks. It has weirs 
through which slowly and without damage any 
excess of feeling is allowed to flow. It makes excuses 
for nature, and regards love as an interesting convict. 
Moral art paints or chisels feet, faces, and rags. It 
regards the body as obscene. It hides with drapery 
that which it has not the genius purely to portray. 
Mediocrity becomes moral from a necessity which it 
has the impudence to call virtue. It pretends to re- 
gard ignorance as the foundation of purity and insists 
that virtue seeks the companionship of the blind. 

Art creates, combines, and reveals. It is the 
highest manifestation of thought, of passion, of love, 



3H ART AND MORALITY. 

of intuition. It is the highest form of expression, of 
history and prophesy. It allows us to look at an 
unmasked soul, to fathom the abysses of passion, to 
understand the heights and depths of love. 

Compared with what is in the mind of man, the 
outward world almost ceases to excite our wonder. 
The impression produced by mountains, seas, and 
stars is not so great, so thrilling, as the music of 
Wagner. The constellations themselves grow small 
when we read "Troilus and Cressida," " Hamlet," or 
"Lear." What are seas and stars in the presence of 
a heroism that holds pain and death as naught? 
What are seas and stars compared with human 
hearts ? What is the quarry compared with the 
statue ? 

Art civilizes because it enlightens, develops, 
strengthens, ennobles. It deals with the beautiful, 
with the passionate, with the ideal. It is the child of 
the heart. To be great, it must deal with the human. 
It must be in accordance with the experience, with the 
hopes, with the fears, and with the possibilities of 
man. No one cares to paint a palace, because there 
is nothing in such a picture to touch the heart. It 
tells of responsibility, of the prison, of the conventional. 



ART AND MORALITY. 315 

It suggests a load — it tells of apprehension, of weari- 
ness and ennui. The picture of a cottage, over which 
runs a vine, a little home thatched with content, with 
its simple life, its natural sunshine and shadow, its 
trees bending with fruit, its hollyhocks and pinks, its 
happy children, its hum of bees, is a poem — a smile 
in the desert of this world. 

The great lady, in velvet and jewels, makes but 
a poor picture. There is not freedom enough in her 
life. She is constrained. She is too far away from 
the simplicity of happiness. In her thought there is 
too much of the mathematical. In all art you will 
find a touch of chaos, of liberty ; and there is in all 
artists a little of the vagabond — that is to say, 
genius. 

The nude in art has rendered holy the beauty of 
woman. Every Greek statue pleads for mothers and 
sisters. From these marbles come strains of music. 
They have filled the heart of man with tenderness 
and worship. They have kindled reverence, admira- 
tion and love. The Venus de Milo, that even mutila- 
tion cannot mar, tends only to the elevation of our 
race. It is a miracle of majesty and beauty, the 
supreme idea of the supreme woman. It is a melody 



3l6 ART AND MORALITY. 

in marble. All the lines meet in a kind of voluptuous 
and glad content. The pose is rest itself. The eyes 
are filled with thoughts of love. The breast seems 
dreaming of a child. 

The prudent is not the poetic ; it is the mathemat- 
ical. Genius is the spirit of abandon ; it is joyous, 
irresponsible. It moves in the swell and curve of 
billows ; it is careless of conduct and consequence. 
For a moment, the chain of cause and effect seems 
broken ; the soul is free. It gives an account not even 
to itself. Limitations are forgotten ; nature seems 
obedient to the will ; the ideal alone exists ; the uni- 
verse is a symphony. 

Every brain is a gallery of art, and every soul is, 
to a greater or less degree, an artist. The pictures 
and statues that now enrich and adorn the walls and 
niches of the world, as well as those that illuminate 
the pages of its literature, were taken originally from 
the private galleries of the brain. 

The soul — that is to say the artist — compares the 
pictures in its own brain with the pictures that have 
been taken from the galleries of others and made 
visible. This soul, this artist, selects that which is 
nearest perfection in each, takes such parts as it deems 



ART AND MORALITY. 317 

perfect, puts them together, forms new pictures, new 
statues, and in this way creates the ideal. 

To express desires, longings, ecstacies, prophecies 
and passions in form and color ; to put love, hope, 
heroism and triumph in marble ; to paint dreams and 
memories with words ; to portray the purity of dawn, 
the intensity and glory of noon, the tenderness of 
twilight, the splendor and mystery of night, with 
sounds ; to give the invisible to sight and touch, and 
to enrich the common things of earth with gems and 
jewels of the mind — this is Art. 



TRIBUTE TO ROSCOE CONKLING. 



Delivered before the New York State Legislature, at Albany, N. Y., May <?, 1888. 




OSCOE CONKLING— a great man, an 
orator, a statesman, a lawyer, a dis- 
tinguished citizen of the Republic, in 
the zenith of his fame and power has 
reached his journey's end ; and we are 
met, here in the city of his birth, to pay 
our tribute to his worth and work. He earned and 
held a proud position in the public thought. He 
stood for independence, for courage, and above all 
for absolute integrity, and his name was known and 
honored by many millions of his fellow men. 

The literature of many lands is rich with the 
tributes that gratitude, admiration and love have 
paid to the great and honored dead. These tributes 
disclose the character of nations, the ideals of the 
human race. In them we find the estimates of 



320 A TRIBUTE. 

greatness — the deeds and lives that challenged 
praise and thrilled the hearts of men 

In the presence of death, the good man judges 
as he would be judged. He knows that men are 
only fragments — that the greatest walk in shadow, 
and that faults and failures mingle with the lives 
of all. 

In the grave should be buried the prejudices 
and passions born of conflict. Charity should hold 
the scales in which are weighed the deeds of men. 
Peculiarities, traits born of locality and surround- 
ings — these are but the dust of the race — these 
are accidents, drapery, clothes, fashions, that have 
nothing to do with the man except to hide his 
character. They are the clouds that cling to moun- 
tains. Time gives us clearer vision. That which 
was merely local fades away. The words of envy 
are forgotten, and all there is of sterling worth 
remains. He who was called a partisan is a patriot. 
The revolutionist and the outlaw are the founders of 
nations, and he who was regarded as a scheming, 
selfish politician becomes a statesman, a philosopher, 
whose words and deeds shed light. 



A TRIBUTE. 321 

Fortunate is that nation great enough to know 
the great. When a great man dies — one who has 
nobly fought the battle of a life, who has been 
faithful to every trust, and has uttered his highest, 
noblest thought— one who has stood proudly by 
the right in spite of jeer and taunt, neither stopped 
by foe nor swerved by friend — in honoring him, 
in speaking words of praise and love above his dust, 
we pay a tribute to ourselves. 

How poor this world w r ould be without its graves, 
without the memories of its mighty dead. Only the 
voiceless speak forever. 

Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great 
pillars that support the State. 

Above all, the citizens of a free nation should 
honor the brave and independent man— -the man 
of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force. 
Such men are the Atlases on whose mighty shoulders 
rest the great fabric of the republic. Flatterers, 
cringers, crawlers, time-servers are the dangerous 
citizens of a democracy. They who gain applause 
and power by pandering to the mistakes, the preju- 
dices and passions of the multitude, are the enemies 
of liberty. 



322 A TRIBUTE. 

When the intelligent submit to the clamor of the 
many, anarchy begins and the republic reaches the 
edge of chaos. Mediocrity, touched with ambition 
flatters the base and calumniates the great, while the 
true patriot, who will do neither, is often sacrificed. 

In a government of the people a leader should be 
a teacher — he should carry the torch of truth. 

Most people are the slaves of habit — followers of 
custom — believers in the wisdom of the past — and 
were it not for brave and splendid souls, " the dust of 
antique time would lie unswept, and mountainous 
error be too highly heaped for truth to overpeer." 
Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who 
long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the 
keeping of the dead. 

Nothing is grander than when a strong, intrepid 
man breaks chains, levels walls and breasts the many- 
headed mob like some great cliff that meets and 
mocks the innumerable billows of the sea. 

The politician hastens to agree with the majority — 
insists that their prejudice is patriotism, that their 
ignorance is wisdom; — not that he loves them, but 
because he loves himself. The statesman, the real 



A TRIBUTE. 323 

reformer, points out the mistakes of the multitude, 
attacks the prejudices of his countrymen, laughs at 
their follies, denounces their cruelties, enlightens and 
enlarges their minds and educates the conscience — 
not because he loves himself, but because he loves 
and serves the right and wishes to make his country 
great and free. 

With him defeat is but a spur to further effort. 
He who refuses to stoop, who cannot be bribed by 
the promise of success, or the fear of failure — who 
walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands 
erect, is the only victor. Nothing is more despicable 
than to reach fame by crawling, — position by cring- 
ing. 

When real history shall be written by the truthful 
and the wise, these men, these kneelers at the shrines 
of chance and fraud, these brazen idols worshipped 
once as gods, will be the very food of scorn, while 
those who bore the burden of defeat, who earned and 
kept their self-respect, who would not bow to man or 
men for place or power, will wear upon their brows 
the laurel mingled with the oak. 

Roscoe Conkling was a man of superb courage. 



324 A TRIBUTE. 

He not only acted without fear, but he had that 
fortitude of soul that bears the consequences of the 
course pursued without complaint. He was charged 
with being proud. The charge was true-— he was 
proud. His knees were as inflexible as the " un- 
wedgeable and gnarled oak," but he was not vain. 
Vanity rests on the opinion of others — pride, on our 
own. The source of vanity is from without — of 
pride, from within. Vanity is a vane that turns, a 
willow that bends, with every breeze — pride is the 
oak that defies the storm. One is cloud — the other 
rock. One is weakness — the other strength. 

This imperious man entered public life in the 
dawn of the reformation — at a time when the country 
needed men of pride, of principle and courage. The 
institution of slavery had poisoned all the springs of 
power. Before this crime ambition fell upon its 
knees, — politicians, judges, clergymen, and merchant- 
princes bowed low and humbly, with their hats in 
their hands. The real friend of man was denounced 
as the enemy of his country — the real enemy of the 
human race was called a statesman and a patriot. 
Slavery was the bond and pledge of peace, of union, 



A TRIBUTE. 325 

and national greatness. The temple of American 
liberty was finished — the auction-block was the 
corner-stone. 

It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, 
of the political blindness and immorality, of the 
patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation 
of a people who supplemented the incomparable 
Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive 
Slave Law. 

Think of the honored statesmen of that ignoble 
time who wallowed in this mire and who, decorated 
with dripping filth, received the plaudits of their 
fellow-men. The noble, the really patriotic, were 
the victims of mobs, and the shameless were clad 
in the robes of office. 

But let us speak no word of blame — let us feel 
that each one acted according to his light — according 
to his darkness. 

At last the conflict came. The hosts of light and 
darkness prepared to meet upon the fields of war. 
The question was presented : Shall the Republic be 
slave or free ? The Republican party had triumphed 
at the polls. The greatest man in our history was 



326 A TRIBUTE. 

President elect. The victors were appalled — they 
shrank from the great responsibility of success. In 
the presence of rebellion they hesitated — they offered 
to return the fruits of victory. Hoping to avert war 
they were willing that slavery should become im- 
mortal. An amendment to the Constitution was 
proposed, to the effect that no subsequent amendment 
should ever be made that in any way should interfere 
with the right of man to steal his fellow-men. 

This, the most marvellous proposition ever sub- 
mitted to a Congress of civilized men, received in the 
House an overwhelming majority, and the necessary 
two-thirds in the Senate. The Republican party, in 
the moment of its triumph, deserted every principle 
for which it had so gallantly contended, and with the 
trembling hands of fear laid its convictions on the 
altar of compromise. 

The Old Guard, numbering but sixty-five in the 
House, stood as firm as the three hundred at 
Thermopylae. Thaddeus Stevens — as maliciously 
right as any other man was ever wrong — refused 
to kneel. Owen Lovejoy, remembering his brother's 
noble blood, refused to surrender, and on the edge of 



A TRIBUTE. 327 

disunion, in the shadow of civil war, with the air 
filled with sounds of dreadful preparation, while the 
Republican party was retracing its steps, Roscoe 
Conkling voted No. This puts a wreath of glory 
on his tomb. From that vote to the last moment 
of his life he was a champion of equal rights, staunch 
and stalwart. 

From that moment he stood in the front rank. 
He never wavered and he never swerved. By his 
devotion to principle — his courage, the splendor of 
his diction, — by his varied and profound knowledge, 
his conscientious devotion to the great cause, and by 
his intellectual scope and grasp, he won and held 
the admiration of his fellow-men. 

Disasters in the field, reverses at the polls, did 
not and could not shake his courage or his faith. 
He knew the ghastly meaning of defeat. He knew 
that the great ship that slavery sought to strand and 
wreck was freighted with the world's sublimest 
hope. 

He battled for a nation's life — for the rights of 
slaves — the dignity of labor, and the liberty of all. 
He guarded with a father's care the rights of the 



328 A TRIBUTE. 

hunted, the hated and despised. He attacked the 
savage statutes of the reconstructed States with a 
torrent of invective, scorn and execration. He was not 
satisfied until the freedman was an American Citizen — 
clothed with every civil right — until the Constitution 
was his shield — until the ballot was his sword. 

And long after we are dead, the colored man in 
this and other lands will speak his name in reverence 
and love. Others wavered, but he stood firm ; some 
were false, but he was proudly true — fearlessly faith- 
ful unto death. 

He gladly, proudly grasped the hands of colored 
men who stood with him as makers of our laws, and 
treated them as equals and as friends. The cry of 
" social equality " coined and uttered by the cruel and 
the base, was to him the expression of a great and 
splendid truth. He knew that no man can be the 
equal of the one he robs- — that the intelligent and 
unjust are not the superiors of the ignorant and 
honest — and he also felt, and proudly felt, that if 
he were not too great to reach the hand of help and 
recognition to the slave, no other senator could right- 
fully refuse, 



A TRIBUTE. 329 

We rise by raising others — and he who stoops 
above the fallen, stands erect. 

Nothing can be grander than to sow the seeds of 
noble thoughts and virtuous deeds — to liberate the 
bodies and the souls of men — to earn the grateful 
homage of a race — and then, in life's last shadowy 
hour, to know that the historian of Liberty will be 
compelled to write your name. 

There are no words intense enough, — with heart 
enough — to express my admiration for the great and 
gallant souls who have in every age and every land 
upheld the right, and who have lived and died for 
freedom's sake. 

In our lives have been the grandest years that 
man has lived, that Time has measured by the flight 
of worlds. 

The history of that great Party that let the 
oppressed go free — that lifted our nation from the 
depths of savagery to freedom's cloudless heights, 
and tore with holy hands from every law the words 
that sanctified the cruelty of man, is the most glorious 
in the annals of our race. Never before was there 
such a moral exaltation — never a party with a pur- 



33° A TRIBUTE. 

pose so pure and high. It was the embodied con- 
science of a nation, the enthusiasm of a people guided 
by wisdom, the impersonation of justice ; and the 
sublime victory achieved loaded even the conquered 
with all the rights that freedom can bestow. 

Roscoe Conkling was an absolutely honest man. 

Honesty is the oak around which all other virtues 
cling. Without that they fall, and groveling die in 
weeds and dust. He believed that a nation should 
discharge its obligations. He knew that a promise 
could not be made often enough, or emphatic 
enough, to take the place of payment. He felt that 
the promise of the government was the promise of 
every citizen — that a national obligation was a 
personal debt, and that no possible combination of 
words and pictures could take the place of coin. 
He uttered the splendid truth that "the higher 
obligations among men are not set down in writing 
signed and sealed, but reside in honor." He knew 
that repudiation was the sacrifice of honor — the death 
of the national soul. He knew that without charac- 
ter, without integrity, there is no wealth, and that 
below poverty, below bankruptcy, is the rayless abyss 



A TRIBUTE. 33I 

of repudiation. He upheld the sacredness of con- 
tracts, of plighted national faith, and helped to save 
and keep the honor of his native land. This adds 
another laurel to his brow. 

He was the ideal representative, faithful and 
incorruptible. He believed that his constituents and 
his country were entitled to the fruit of his experience, 
to his best and highest thought. No man ever held 
the standard of responsibility higher than he. He 
voted according to his judgment, his conscience. 
He made no bargains — he neither bought nor sold. 

To correct evils, abolish abuses and inaugurate 
reforms, he believed was not only the duty, but the 
privilege, of a legislator. He neither sold nor mort- 
gaged himself. He was in Congress during the 
years of vast expenditure, of war and waste — when 
the credit of the nation was loaned to individuals — 
when claims were thick as leaves in June, when the 
amendment of a statute, the change of a single word, 
meant millions, and when empires were given to cor- 
porations. He stood at the summit of his power — 
peer of the greatest — a leader tried and trusted. He 
had the tastes of a prince, the fortune of a peasant, 



332 A TRIBUTE. 

and yet he never swerved. No corporation was 
great enough or rich enough to purchase him. His 
vote could not be bought "for all the sun sees, or 
the close earth wombs, or the profound seas hide." 
His hand was never touched by any bribe, and on 
his soul there never was a sordid stain. Poverty 
was his priceless crown. 

Above his marvellous intellectual gifts — above 
all place he ever reached, — above the ermine he 
refused, — rises his integrity like some great mountain 
peak — and there it stands, firm as the earth beneath, 
pure as the stars above. 

He was a great lawyer. He understood the 
frame-work, the anatomy, the foundations of law; 
was familiar with the great streams and currents and 
tides of authority. 

He knew the history of legislation — the principles 
that have been settled upon the fields of war. He 
knew the maxims, — those crystallizations of common 
sense, those hand-grenades of argument. He was 
not a case-lawyer — a decision index, or an echo; 
he was original, thoughtful and profound. He had 
breadth and scope, resource, learning, logic, and above 



A TRIBUTE. 333 

all, a sense of justice. He was painstaking and con- 
scientious — anxious to know the facts— preparing for 
every attack, ready for every defence. He rested only 
when the end was reached. During the contest, he 
neither sent nor received a flag of truce. He was 
true to his clients — making their case his. Feeling 
responsibility, he listened patiently to details, and to 
his industry there were only the limits of time and 
strength. He was a student of the Constitution. He 
knew the boundaries of State and Federal jurisdiction, 
and no man was more familiar with those great de- 
cisions that are the peaks and promontories, the 
headlands and the beacons, of the law. 

He was an orator, logical, — earnest, intense and 
picturesque. He laid the foundation with care, with 
accuracy and skill, and rose by "cold gradation and 
well balanced form" from the corner-stone of state- 
ment to the domed conclusion. He filled the stage. 
He satisfied the eye — the audience was his. He 
had that indefinable thing called presence. Tall, 
commanding, erect — ample in speech, graceful in 
compliment, Titanic in denunciation, rich in illustra- 
tion, prodigal of comparison and metaphor — and his 



334 A TRIBUTE. 

sentences, measured and rhythmical, fell like music 
on the enraptured throng. 

He abhorred the Pharisee, and loathed all con- 
scientious fraud. He had a profound aversion for 
those who insist on putting base motives back of the 
good deeds of others. He wore no mask. He knew 
his friends — his enemies knew him. 

He had no patience with pretence — with patriotic 
reasons for unmanly acts. He did his work and 
bravely spoke his thought. 

Sensitive to the last degree, he keenly felt the 
blows and stabs of the envious and obscure — of the 
smallest, of the weakest — but the greatest could not 
drive him from conviction's field. He would not 
stoop to ask or give an explanation. He left his 
words and deeds to justify themselves. 

He held in light esteem a friend who heard with 
half-believing ears the slander of a foe. He walked 
a highway of his own, and kept the company of his 
self-respect. He would not turn aside to avoid a 
foe — to greet or gain a friend. 

In his nature there was no compromise. To him 
there were but two paths — the right and wrong. 



A TRIBUTE. 335 

He was maligned, misrepresented and misunder- 
stood — but he would not answer. He knew that 
character speaks louder far than any words. He 
was as silent then as he is now — and his silence, 
better than any form of speech, refuted every charge. 

He was an American — proud of his country, that 
was and ever will be proud of him. He did not find 
perfection only in other lands. He did not grow 
small and shrunken, withered and apologetic, in the 
presence of those upon whom greatness had been 
thrust by chance. He could not be overawed by 
dukes or lords, nor flattered into vertebrateless sub- 
serviency by the patronizing smiles of kings. In 
the midst of conventionalities he had the feeling of 
suffocation. He believed in the royalty of man, in 
the sovereignty of the citizen, and in the matchless 
greatness of this Republic. 

He was of the classic mould — a figure from the 
antique world. He had the pose of the great 
statues — the pride and bearing of the intellectual 
Greek, of the conquering Roman, and he stood in 
the wide free air, as though within his veins there 
flowed the blood of a hundred kings. 



336 A TRIBUTE. 

And as he lived he died. Proudly he entered the 
darkness — or the dawn — that we call death. Un- 
shrinkingly he passed beyond our horizon, beyond 
the twilight's purple hills, beyond the utmost reach 
of human harm or help — to that vast realm of 
silence or of joy where the innumerable dwell, and 
he has left with us his wealth of thought and deed — 
the memory of a brave, imperious, honest man, who 
bowed alone to death. 



A TRIBUTE 

TO 

COURTLANDT PALMER. 




Y FRIENDS : A thinker of pure 
thoughts, a speaker of brave words, a 
doer of generous deeds has reached 
the silent haven that all the dead have 
reached, and where the voyage of 
every life must end ; and we, his 
friends, who even now are hastening after him, are 
met to do the last kind acts that man may do for 
man — to tell his virtues and to lay with tenderness 
and tears his ashes in the sacred place of rest and 
peace. 

Some one has said that in the open hands of death 
we find only what they gave away. 

Let us believe that pure thoughts, brave words 
and generous deeds can never die. Let us believe 



338 A TRIBUTE. 

that they bear fruit and add forever to the well-being 
of the human race. Let us believe that a noble, self- 
denying life increases the moral wealth of man, and 
gives assurance that the future will be grander than 
the past. 

In the monotony of subservience, in the multitude 
of blind followers, nothing is more inspiring than a 
free and independent man — one who gives and asks 
reasons ; one who demands freedom and gives what 
he demands ; one who refuses to be slave or master. 
Such a man was Courtlandt Palmer, to whom we 
pay the tribute of respect and love. 

He was an honest man — he gave the rights he 
claimed. This was the foundation on which he built. 
To think for himself — to give his thought to others ; 
this was to him not only a privilege, not only a right, 
but a duty. 

He believed in self-preservation — in personal in- 
dependence — that is to say, in manhood. 

He preserved the realm of mind from the invasion 
of brute force, and protected the children of the brain 
from the Herod of authority. 

He investigated for himself the questions, the 
problems and the mysteries of life. Majorities were 



A TRIBUTE. 339 

nothing to him. No error could be old enough — 
popular, plausible or profitable enough — to bribe his 
judgment or to keep his conscience still. 

He knew that, next to finding truth, the greatest 
joy is honest search. 

He was a believer in intellectual hospitality, in the 
fair exchange of thought, in good mental manners, in 
the amenities of the soul, in the chivalry of discussion. 

He insisted that those who speak should hear ; 
that those who question should answer ; that each 
should strive not for a victory over others, but for the 
discovery of truth, and that truth when found should 
be welcomed by every human soul. 

He knew that truth has no fear of investigation — 
of being understood. He knew that truth loves the 
day — that its enemies are ignorance, prejudice, ego- 
tism, bigotry, hypocrisy, fear and darkness, and that 
intelligence, candor, honesty, love and light are its 
eternal friends. 

He believed in the morality of the useful — that 
the virtues are the friends of man — the seeds of joy. 

He knew that consequences determine the quality 
of actions, and " that whatsoever a man sows that 
shall he also reap." 



340 A TRIBUTE. 

In the positive philosophy of August Comte he 
found the framework of his creed. In the conclusions 
of that great, sublime and tender soul he found the 
rest, the serenity and the certainty he sought. 

The clouds had fallen from his life. He saw that 
the old faiths were but phases in the growth of man — 
that out from the darkness, up from the depths, the 
human race through countless ages and in every land 
had struggled towards the ever-growing light. 

He felt that the living are indebted to the noble 
dead, and that each should pay his debt ; that he 
should pay it by preserving to the extent of his power 
the good he has, by destroying the hurtful, by adding 
to the knowledge of the world, by giving better than 
he had received ; and that each should be the bearer 
of a torch, a giver of light for all that is, for all 
to be. 

This was the religion of duty perceived, of duty 
within the reach of man, within the circumference of 
the known — a religion without mystery, with experi- 
ence for the foundation of belief — a religion understood 
by the head and approved by the heart — a religion 
that appealed to reason with a definite end in view — 
the civilization and development of the human race by 



A TRIBUTE. 341 

legitimate, adequate and natural means— that is to 
say, by ascertaining the conditions of progress and 
by teaching each to be noble enough to live for all. 

This is the gospel of man ; this is the gospel of 
this world ; this is the religion of humanity ; this 
is a philosophy that contemplates not with scorn, 
but with pity, with admiration and with love all that 
man has done, regarding, as it does, the past with all 
its faults and virtues, its sufferings, its cruelties and 
crimes, as the only road by which the perfect could 
be reached. 

He denied the supernatural — the phantoms and 
the ghosts that fill the twilight-land of fear. To 
him and for him there was but one religion — the 
religion of pure thoughts, of noble words, of self- 
denying deeds, of honest work for all the world — the 
religion of Help and Hope. 

Facts were the foundation of his faith ; history 
was his prophet ; reason his guide ; duty his deity ; 
happiness the end ; intelligence the means. 

He knew that man must be the providence of 
man. 

He did not believe in Religion and Science, but 
in the Religion of Science- — that is to say, wisdom 



34 2 A TRIBUTE. 

glorified by love, the Saviour of our race — the 
religion that conquers prejudice and hatred, that 
drives all superstition from the mind, that enobles, 
lengthens and enriches life, that drives from every 
home the wolves of want, from every heart the 
fiends of selfishness and fear, and from every brain 
the monsters of the night. 

He lived and labored for his fellow-men. He 
sided with the weak and poor against the strong 
and rich. He welcomed light. His face was ever 
towards the East. 

According to his light he lived. "The world, 
was his country — to do good his religion." There 
is no language to express a nobler creed than this ; 
nothing can be grander, more comprehensive, nearer 
perfect. This was the creed that glorified his life 
and made his death sublime. 

He was afraid to do wrong, and for that reason 
was not afraid to die. 

He knew that the end was near. He knew that 
his work was done. He stood within the twilight, 
within the deepening gloom, knowing that for the 
last time the gold was fading from the West and 
that there could not fall again within his eyes the 



A TRIBUTE. 343 

trembling lustre of another dawn. He knew that 
night had come, and yet his soul was filled with 
light, for in that night the memory of his generous 
deeds shone out like stars. 

What can we say? What words can solve the 
mystery of life, the mystery of death ? What words 
can justly pay a tribute to the man who lived to his 
ideal, who spoke his honest thought, and who was 
turned aside neither by envy, nor hatred, nor contu- 
mely, nor slander, nor scorn, nor fear? What words 
will do that life the justice that we know and feel ? 

A heart breaks, a man dies, a leaf falls in the far 
forest, a babe is born, and the great world sweeps on. 

By the grave of man stands the angel of Silence. 

No one can tell which is better — Life with its 
gleams and shadows, its thrills and pangs, its ecstasy 
and tears, its wreaths and thorns, its crowns, its 
glories and Golgothas, or Death, with its peace, its 
rest, its cool and placid brow that hath w r ithin no 
memory or fear of grief or pain. 

Farewell, dear friend. The world is better for 
your life — The world is braver for your death. 

Farewell ! We loved you living, and we love 
you now. 



. 



TRIBUTE TO RICHARD H. WHITING. 




k Y FRIENDS: The river of another life 
has reached the sea. 

Again we are in the presence of 
that eternal peace that we call death. 

My life has been rich in friends, 
but I never had a better or a truer one 
than he who lies in silence here. He was as steadfast, 
as faithful, as the stars. 

Richard H. Whiting was an absolutely honest 
man. His word was gold — his promise was fulfill- 
ment — and there never has been, there never will be, 
on this poor earth, any thing nobler than an honest, 
loving soul. 

This man was as reliable as the attraction of grav- 
itation — he knew no shadow of turning. He was as 
generous as autumn, as hospitable as summer, and as 






346 A TRIBUTE. 

tender as a perfect day in June. He forgot only 
himself, and asked favors only for others. He 
begged for the opportunity to do good — to stand 
by a friend, to support a cause, to defend what he 
believed to be right. 

He was a lover of nature — of the woods, the fields 
and flowers. He was a home-builder. He believed 
in the family and the fireside— in the sacredness of 
the hearth. 

He was a believer in the religion of deed, and his 
creed was to do good. No man has ever slept in 
death who nearer lived his creed. 

I have known him for many years, and have yet 
to hear a word spoken of him except in praise. 

His life was full of honor, of kindness and of 
helpful deeds. Besides all, his soul was free. He 
feared nothing, except to do wrong. He was a 
believer in the gospel of help and hope. He knew 
how much better, how much more sacred, a kind act 
is than any theory the brain has wrought. 

The good are the noble. His life filled the lives 
of others with sunshine. He has left a legacy of 
glory to his children. They can truthfully say that 
within their veins is right royal blood — the blood of 



A TRIBUTE. 347 

an honest, generous man, of a steadfast friend, of one 
who was true to the very gates of death. 

If there be another world, another life beyond 
the shore of this, — if the great and good who died 
upon this orb are there, — then the noblest and the 
best, with eager hands, have welcomed him — the 
equal in honor, in generosity, of any one that ever 
passed beyond the veil. 

To me this world is growing poor. New friends 
can never fill the places of the old. 

Farewell ! If this is the end, then you have left 
to us the sacred memory of a noble life. If this is 
not the end, there is no world in which you, my 
friend, will not be loved and welcomed. Farewell ! 



THE BRAIN. 




HE dark continent of motive and desire 
has never been explored. In the brain, 
that wondrous world with one inhabitant, 
there are recesses dim and dark, treach- 
erous sands and dangerous shores, where 
seeming sirens tempt and fade ; streams 
that rise in unknown lands from hidden springs, 
strange seas with ebb and flow of tides, resistless 
billows urged by storms of flame, profound and 
awful depths hidden by mist of dreams, obscure and 
phantom realms where vague and fearful things are 
half revealed, jungles where passion's tigers crouch, 
and skies of cloud and blue where fancies fly with 
painted wings that dazzle and mislead ; and the poor 
sovereign of this pictured world is led by old desires 
and ancient hates, and stained by crimes of many 
vanished years, and pushed by hands that long ago 
were dust, until he feels like some bewildered slave 
that Mockery has throned and crowned. 



THE SACRED LEAVES. 




EARLY four centuries ago Columbus, 
the adventurous, in the blessed Island of 
Cuba, saw happy people with rolled leaves 
between their lips. Above their heads 
were little clouds of smoke. Their faces 
were serene, and in their eyes was the 
autumnal heaven of content. These people were 
kind, innocent, gentle and loving. 

The climate of Cuba is the friendship of the earth 
and air, and of this climate the sacred leaves were 
born — the leaves that breed in the mind of him who 
uses them the cloudless., happy days in which they 
grew. 

These leaves make friends, and celebrate with 
gentle rites the vows of peace. They have given 
consolation to the world. They are the companions 
of the lonely — the friends of the imprisoned, of the 




35° THE SACRED LEAVES. 

exiled, of workers in mines, of fellers of forests, of 
sailors on the desolate seas. They are the givers of 
strength and calm to the vexed and wearied minds of 
those who build with thought and dream the temples 
of the soul. 

They tell of hope and rest. They smooth the 
wrinkled brows of pain — drive fears and strange 
misshapen dreads from out the mind and fill the heart 
with rest and peace. 

Within their magic warp and woof some potent 
gracious spell imprisoned lies, that, when released by 
fire, doth softly steal within the fortress of the brain 
and bind in sleep the captured sentinels of care and 
grief. 

These leaves are the friends of the fireside, and 
their smoke, like incense, rises from myriads of happy 
homes. 

Cuba is the smile of the sea. 



\ \ 



MRS. MARY H. FISKE. 



At Scottish Rite Hall, New York, February 6th, 1889. 




Y FRIENDS: In the presence of the 
two great mysteries, Life and Death, 
we are met to say above this still, 
unconscious house of clay, a few words 
of kindness, of regret, of love, and 
hope. 

In this presence, let us speak of the goodness, the 
charity, the generosity and the genius of the dead. 

Only flowers should be laid upon the tomb. In 
life's last pillow there should be no thorns. 

Mary Fiske was like herself — she patterned 
after none. She was a genius, and put her soul in 
all she did and wrote. She cared nothing for roads, 
nothing for beaten paths, nothing for the footsteps of 



352 A TRIBUTE. 

others — she went across the fields and through the 
woods and by the winding streams, and down the 
vales, or over crags, wherever fancy led. She wrote 
lines that leaped with laughter and words that were 
wet with tears. She gave us quaint thoughts, and 
sayings filled with the "pert and nimble spirit of 
mirth." Her pages were flecked with sunshine and 
shadow, and in every word were the pulse and breath 
of life. 

Her heart went out to all the wretched in this 
weary world — and yet she seemed as joyous as 
though grief and death were nought but words. She 
wept where others wept, but in her own misfortunes 
found the food of hope. She cared for the to-morrow 
of others, but not for her own. She lived for to-day. 

Some hearts are like a waveless pool, satisfied to 
hold the image of a wondrous star — but hers was full 
of motion, life and light and storm. 

She longed for freedom. Every limitation was a 
prison's wall. Rules were shackles, and forms were 
made for serfs and slaves. 

She gave her utmost thought. She praised all 
generous deeds ; applauded the struggling and even 
those who failed. 



A TRIBUTE. 353 

She pitied the poor, the forsaken, the friendless. 
No one could fall below her pity, no one could wan- 
der beyond the circumference of her sympathy. To 
her there were no outcasts — they were victims. She 
knew that the inhabitants of palaces and penitentiaries 
might change places without adding to the injustice 
of the world. She knew that circumstances and con- 
ditions determine character — that the lowest and the 
worst of our race were children once, as pure as light, 
whose cheeks dimpled with smiles beneath the heaven 
of a mother's eyes. She thought of the road they 
had travelled, of the thorns that had pierced their feet, 
of the deserts they had crossed, and so, instead of 
words of scorn she gave the eager hand of help. 

No one appealed to her in vain. She listened to 
the story of the poor, and all she had she gave. A 
god could do no more. 

The destitute and suffering turned naturally to 
her. The maimed and hurt sought for her open door, 
and the helpless put their hands in hers. 

She shielded the weak — she attacked the strong. 

Her heart was open as the gates of day. She 
shed kindness as the sun sheds light. If all her 
deeds were flowers, the air would be faint with per- 






354 A TRIBUTE. 

fume. If all her charities could change to melodies, 
a symphony would fill the sky. 

Mary Fiske had within her brain the divine fire 
called genius, and in her heart the "touch of nature 
that makes the whole world kin." 

She wrote as a stream runs, that winds and 
babbles through the shadowy fields, that falls in 
foam of flight and haste and laughing joins the 
sea. 

A little while ago a babe was found — one that 
had been abandoned by its mother — left as a legacy 
to chance or fate. The warm heart of Mary Fiske, 
now cold in death, was touched. She took the 
waif and held it lovingly to her breast and made 
the child her own. 

We pray thee, Mother Nature, that thou wilt take 
this woman and hold her as tenderly in thy arms, as 
she held and pressed against her generous, throbbing 
heart, the abandoned babe. 

We ask no more. 

In this presence, let us remember our faults, our 
frailties, and the generous, helpful, self-denying, 
loving deeds of Mary Fiske. 



Aug. 25, 1810. 



Au g> 25> ^89. 



IN MEMORY OF HORACE SEAVER 




ORACE SEAVER was a pioneer, a torch- 
bearer, a toiler in that great field we call 
the world — a worker for his fellow-men. 
At the end of his task he has fallen 
asleep, and we are met to tell the story 
of his long and useful life — to pay our 
tribute to his work and worth. 

He was one who saw the dawn while others lived 
in night. He kept his face toward the " purpling 
east" and watched the coming of the blessed day. 

He always sought for light. His object was to 
know — to find a reason for his faith — a fact on which 
to build. 

In superstition's sands he sought the gems of 
truth ; in superstition's night he looked for stars. 

Born in New England — reared amidst the cruel 
superstitions of his age and time, he had the manhood 
and the courage to investigate, and he had the good- 
ness and the courage to tell his honest thoughts. 



356 IN MEMORY OF 

He was always kind, and sought to win the con- 
fidence of men by sympathy and love. There was 
no taint or touch of malice in his blood. To him his 
fellows did not seem depraved — they were not wholly 
bad — there was within the heart of each the seeds of 
good. He knew that back of every thought and act 
were forces uncontrolled. He wisely said: " Circum- 
stances furnish the seeds of good and evil, and man 
is but the soil in which they grow." He fought the 
creed, and loved the man. He pitied those who feared 
and shuddered at the thought of death — who dwelt 
in darkness and in dread. 

The religion of his day filled his heart with horror. 

He was kind, compassionate, and tender, and 
could not fall upon his knees before a cruel and 
revengeful God — he could not bow to one who slew 
with famine, sword and fire — to one pitiless as pesti- 
lence, relentless as the lightning stroke. Jehovah 
had no attribute that he could love. 

He attacked the creed of New England — a creed 
that had within it the ferocity of Knox, the malice of 
Calvin, the cruelty of Jonathan Edwards — a religion 
that had a monster for a God — a religion whose 
dogmas would have shocked cannibals feasting upon 
babes. 



HORACE SEAVER. 357 

Horace Seaver followed the light of his brain — 
the impulse of his heart. He was attacked, but 
he answered the insulter with a smile ; and even 
he who coined malignant lies was treated as a 
friend misled. He did not ask God to forgive 
his enemies — he forgave them himself. He was 
sincere. Sincerity is the true and perfect mirror of 
the mind. It reflects the honest thought. It is 
the foundation of character, and without it there 
is no moral grandeur. 

Sacred are the lips from which has issued only- 
truth. Over all wealth, above all station, above 
the noble, the robed and crowned, rises the sincere 
man. Happy is the man who neither paints nor 
patches, veils nor veneers ! Blessed is he who wears 
no mask. 

The man who lies before us wrapped in perfect 
peace, practiced no art to hide or half conceal his 
thought. He did not write or speak the double words 
that might be useful in retreat. He gave a truthful 
transcript of his mind, and sought to make his 
meaning clear as light. 

To use his own words, he had "the courage 
which impels a man to do his duty, to hold fast his 



358 IN MEMORY OF 

integrity, to maintain a conscience void of offence, at 
every hazard and at every sacrifice, in defiance of 
the world." 

He lived to his ideal. He sought the approbation 
of himself. He did not build his character upon 
the opinions of others, and it was out of the very 
depths of his nature that he asked this profound 
question : 

" What is there in other men that makes us desire 
their approbation, and fear their censure more than 
our own ? " 

Horace Seaver was a good and loyal citizen of 
the mental republic — a believer in intellectual hospi- 
tality, one who knew that bigotry is born of ignorance 
and fear — the provincialisms of the brain. He did 
not belong to the tribe, or to the nation, but to the 
human race. His sympathy was wide as want and, 
like the sky, bent above the suffering world. 

This man had that superb thing called moral 
courage — courage in its highest form. He knew 
that his thoughts were not the thoughts of others 
— that he was with the few, and that where one 
would take his side, thousands would be his eager 
foes. He knew that wealth would scorn and cultured 



HORACE SEAVER. 359 

ignorance deride, and that believers in the creeds, 
buttressed by law and custom, would hurl the missiles 
of revenge and hate. He knew that lies, like snakes, 
would fill the pathway of his life — and yet he told his 
honest thought — told it without hatred and without 
contempt — told it as it really was. And so, through 
all his days, his heart was sound and stainless to the 
core. 

When he enlisted in the army whose banner is 
light, the honest investigator was looked upon as lost 
and cursed, and even Christian criminals held him in 
contempt. The believing embezzler, the orthodox 
wife-beater, even the murderer, lifted his bloody 
hands and thanked God that on his soul there was no 
stain of unbelief. 

In nearly every state of our republic, the man who 
denied the absurdities and impossibilities lying at the 
foundation of what is called orthodox religion, was 
denied his civil rights. He was not canopied by the 
aegis of the law. He stood beyond the reach of sym- 
pathy. He was not allowed to testify against the 
invader of his home, the seeker for his life — his lips 
were closed. He was declared dishonorable, because 
he was honest His unbelief made him a social leper, 



360 IN MEMORY OF 

a pariah, an outcast. He was the victim of religious 
hate and scorn. Arrayed against him were all the 
prejudices and all the forces and hypocrisies of society. 
All mistakes and lies were his enemies. Even the 
theist was denounced as a disturber of the peace, 
although he told his thoughts in kind and candid 
words. He was called a blasphemer, because he 
sought to rescue the reputation of his God from the 
slanders of orthodox priests. 

Such was the bigotry of the time, that natural 
love was lost. The unbelieving son was hated by 
his pious sire, and even the mother's heart was by 
her creed turned into stone. 

Horace Seaver pursued his way. He worked and 
wrought as best he could, in solitude and want. He 
knew the day would come. He lived to be rewarded 
for his toil — to see most of the laws repealed that had 
made outcasts of the noblest, the wisest, and the best. 
He lived to see the foremost preachers of the world 
attack the sacred creeds. He lived to see the sciences 
released from superstition's clutch. He lived to 
see the orthodox theologian take his place with the 
professor of the black art, the fortune-teller, and 
the astrologer. He lived to see the greatest of 



HORACE SEAVER. 36 1 

the world accept his thought — to see the theologian 
displaced by the true priests of Nature — by Hum- 
boldt and Darwin, by Huxley and Haeckel. 

Within the narrow compass of his life the world 
was changed. The railway, the steamship, and the 
telegraph made all nations neighbors. Countless 
inventions have made the luxuries of the past the 
necessities of to-day. Life has been enriched, and 
man ennobled. The geologist has read the records 
of frost and flame, of wind and wave — the astronomer 
has told the story of the stars — the biologist has 
sought the germ of life, and in every department of 
knowledge the torch of science sheds its sacred light. 

The ancient creeds have grown absurd. The 
miracles are small and mean. The inspired book is 
filled with fables told to please a childish world, and 
the dogma of eternal pain now shocks the heart and 
brain. 

He lived to see a monument unveiled to Bruno 
in the city of Rome — to Giordano Bruno — that great 
man who two hundred and eighty-nine years ago 
suffered death for having proclaimed the truths that 
since have filled the world with joy. He lived to 
see the victim of the church a victor — lived to see 



362 IN MEMORY OF 

his memory honored by a nation freed from papal 
chains. 

He worked knowing what the end must be — ex- 
pecting little while he lived — but knowing that every 
fact in the wide universe was on his side. He knew 
that truth can wait, and so he worked patient as 
eternity. 

He had the brain of a philosopher and the heart 
of a child. 

Horace Seaver was a man of common sense. 

By that I mean, one who knows the law of aver- 
age. He denied the bible, not on account of what 
has been discovered in astronomy, or the length of 
time it took to form the delta of the Nile — but he 
compared the things he found with what he knew. 

He knew that antiquity added nothing to proba- 
bility — that lapse of time can never take the place of 
cause, and that the dust can never gather thick 
enough upon mistakes to make them equal with the 
truth. 

He knew that the old, by no possibility, could 
have been more wonderful than the new, and that 
the present is a perpetual torch by which we know 
the past. 



HORACE SEAVER. 363 

To him all miracles were mistakes, whose parents 
were cunning and credulity. He knew that miracles 
were not, because they are not. 

He believed in the sublime, unbroken, and eternal 
march of causes and effects — denying the chaos of 
chance, and the caprice of power. 

He tested the past by the now, and judged of all 
the men and races of the world by those he knew. 

He believed in the religion of free thought and 
good deed — of character, of sincerity, of honest en- 
deavor, of cheerful help — and above all, in the religion 
of love and liberty — in a religion for every day — for 
the world in which we live — for the present — the 
religion of roof and raiment, of food, of intelligence, 
of intellectual hospitality — the religion that gives 
health and happiness, freedom and content — in the 
religion of work, and in the ceremonies of honest 
labor. 

He lived for this world ; if there be another, he 
will live for that. 

He did what he could for the destruction of fear — 
the destruction of the imaginary monster who rewards 
the few in heaven — the monster who tortures the 
many in perdition. 






364 IN MEMORY OF 

He was a friend of all the world, and sought to 
civilize the human race. 

For more than fifty years he labored to free the 
bodies and the souls of men — and many thousands 
have read his words with joy. He sought the 
suffering and oppressed. He sat by those in pain — 
and his helping hand was laid in pity on the brow of 
death. 

He asked only to be treated as he treated others. 
He asked for only what he earned, and had the man- 
hood to cheerfully accept the consequences of his 
actions. He expected no reward for the goodness of 
another. 

But he has lived his life. We should shed no 
tears except the tears of gratitude. We should rejoice 
that he lived so long. 

In Nature's course, his time had come. The 
four seasons were complete in him. The Spring 
could never come again. The measure of his years 
was full. 

When the day is done — when the work of a life 
is finished — when the gold of evening meets the dusk 
of night, beneath the silent stars the tired laborer 
should fall asleep. To outlive usefulness is a double 



HORACE SEAVER. 365 

death. " Let me not live after my flame lacks oil, 
to be the snuff of younger spirits." 

When the old oak is visited in vain by Spring — 
when light and rain no longer thrill — it is not well 
to stand leafless, desolate, and alone. It is better far 
to fall where Nature softly covers all with woven 
moss and creeping vine. 

How little, after all, we know of what is ill or well ! 
How little of this wondrous stream of cataracts and 
pools — this stream of life, that rises in a world un- 
known, and flows to that mysterious sea whose shore 
the foot of one who comes has never pressed ! How 
little of this life we know — this struggling ray of 
light 'twixt gloom and gloom — this strip of land by 
verdure clad, between the unknown wastes — this 
throbbing moment filled with love and pain — this 
dream that lies between the shadowy shores of sleep 
and death ! 

We stand upon this verge of crumbling time. 
We love, we hope, we disappear. Again we mingle 
with the dust, and the "knot intrinsicate " forever 
falls apart. 

But this we know: A noble life enriches all the 
world. 



366 IN MEMORY OF HORACE SEAVER. 

Horace Seaver lived for others. He accepted toil 
and hope deferred. Poverty was his portion. Like 
Socrates, he did not seek to adorn his body, but 
rather his soul with the jewels of charity, modesty, 
courage, and above all, with a love of liberty. 

Farewell, O brave and modest man ! 

Your lips, between which truths burst into 
blossom, are forever closed. Your loving heart has 
ceased to beat. Your busy brain is still, and from 
your hand has dropped the sacred torch. 

Your noble, self-denying life has honored us, and 
we will honor you. 

You were my friend, and I was yours. Above 
your silent clay I pay this tribute to your worth. 

Farewell I 



WHAT IS POETRY? 




HE whole world is engaged in the invisi- 
ble commerce of thought — that is to say, 
in the exchange of thoughts by words, 
symbols, sounds, colors, and forms. The 
motions of the silent, invisible world, 
where feeling glows and thought flames — 
that contains all seeds of action- — are made known 
only by sounds and colors, forms, objects, relations, 
uses, and qualities — so that the visible universe is a 
dictionary, an aggregation of symbols, by which and 
through which is carried on the invisible commerce of 
thought. Each object is capable of many meanings, 
or of being used in many ways to convey ideas, or 
states of feeling, or facts that take place in the world 
of the brain. 

The greatest poet is the one who selects the best, 
the most appropriate symbols to convey the best, the 
highest, the sublimest thoughts. Each man occupies 



368 WHAT IS POETRY ? 

a world of his own. He is the only citizen of his 
world. He is subject and sovereign, and the best he 
can do is to give the facts concerning the world in 
which he lives, to the citizens of other worlds. No 
two of these worlds are alike. They are of all kinds, 
from the flat, barren, and uninteresting — from the 
small and shriveled and worthless — to those whose 
rivers and mountains and seas and constellations 
belittle and cheapen the visible universe. The inhabi- 
tants of these marvelous worlds have been the singers 
of songs, utterers of great speech — the creators of art. 

And here lies the difference between creators and 
imitators : the creator tells what passes in his own 
world — the imitator does not. The imitator abdicates, 
and by the fact of imitation falls upon his knees. 
He is like one who, hearing a traveler talk, pretends 
to others that he has traveled. 

In nearly all lands, the poet has been privileged. 
For the sake of beauty, they have allowed him to 
speak, and for that reason he has told the story of the 
oppressed, and has excited the indignation of honest 
men and even the pity of tyrants. He, above all 
others, has added to the intellectual beauty of the 
world. 

What I have said is not only true of poetry — it is 






WHAT IS POETRY ? 369 

true of all speech. All are compelled to use the visi- 
ble world as a dictionary. Words have been in- 
vented and are being invented — for the reason that 
new powers are found in the old symbols, new quali- 
ties, relations, uses, and meanings. The growth of 
language means the development of the human mind. 
The savage needs but few symbols — the civilized 
many — the poet most of all. 

The old idea was, however, that the poet must be 
a rhymer. Before printing was known, it was said 
that rhyme assists the memory. That excuse no 
longer exists. 

Is rhyme a necessary part of poetry ? In my judg- 
ment, rhyme is a hindrance to expression. The 
rhymer is compelled to wander from his subject — to 
say more or less than he means — to introduce irrele- 
vant matter that interferes continually with the dra- 
matic action and is a perpetual obstruction to sincere 
utterance. 

All poems, of necessity, must be short. The 
highly and purely poetic is the sudden bursting into 
blossom of a great and tender thought. The plant- 
ing of the seed, the growth, the bud and flower must 
be rapid. The spring must be quick and warm — the 
soil perfect, the sunshine and rain enough — every- 



370 WHAT IS POETRY ? 

thing should tend to hasten, nothing to delay. In 
poetry, as in wit, the crystallization'must be sudden. 

The greatest poems are rhythmical. While rhyme 
is a hindrance, rhythm seems to be the comrade of 
the poetic. Rhythm has a natural foundation. Un- 
der emotion the blood rises and falls, the muscles 
contract and relax, and this action of the blood is as 
rhythmical as the rise and fall of the sea. In the high- 
est form of expression, the thought should be in 
harmony with this natural ebb and flow. 

The highest poetic truth is expressed in rhythmical 
form. I have sometimes thought that an idea selects 
its own words, chooses its own garments, and that 
when the thought has possession, absolutely, of the 
speaker or writer, he unconsciously allows the thought 
to clothe itself. 

The great poetry of the world keeps time with the 
winds and waves. 

I do not mean by rhythm a recurring accent at 
accurately measured intervals. Perfect time is the 
death of music. There should always be room for 
eager haste and delicious delay, and whatever change 
there may be in the rhythm or time, the action itself 
should suggest perfect freedom. 

A word more about rhythm. I believe that certain 



WHAT IS POETRY? 37 1 

feelings and passions — joy, grief, emulation, revenge, 
produce certain molecular movements in the brain — 
that every thought is accompanied by certain physical 
phenomena. Now it may be that certain sounds, 
colors, and forms produce the same molecular action 
in the brain that accompanies certain feelings, and 
that these sounds, colors, and forms produce first, the 
molecular movements, and these in their turn re- 
produce the feelings, emotions, and states of mind 
capable of producing the same or like molecular 
movements. So that what we call heroic music, pro- 
duces the same molecular action in the brain — the 
same physical changes — that are produced by the real 
feeling of heroism ; that the sounds we call plaintive 
produce the same molecular movement in the brain 
that grief, or the twilight of grief, actually produces. 
There may be a rhythmical molecular movement be- 
longing to each state of mind, that accompanies each 
thought or passion, and it may be that music, or 
painting, or sculpture, produces the same state of 
mind or feeling that produces the music or painting 
or sculpture, by producing the same molecular move- 
ments. 

All arts are born of the same spirit, and express 
like thoughts in different ways — that is to say, they 



372 WHAT IS POETRY ? 

produce like states of mind and feeling. The 
sculptor, the painter, the composer, the poet, the ora- 
tor, work to the same end, with different materials. 
The painter expresses through form and color and re- 
lation ; the sculptor through form and relation. The 
poet also paints and chisels — his words give form, re- 
lation, and color. His statues and his paintings do 
not crumble, neither do they fade, nor will they, as 
long as language endures. The composer touches 
the passions, produces the very states of feeling pro- 
duced by the painter and sculptor, the poet and ora- 
tor. In all these there must be rhythm — that is to 
say, proportion — that is to say, harmony, melody. 

So that the greatest poet is the one who idealizes 
the common, who gives new meanings to old sym- 
bols, who transfigures the ordinary things of life. 
He must deal with the hopes and fears, and the 
experiences, of the people. 

The poetic is not the exceptional. A perfect poem 
is like a perfect day. It has the undefinable charm of 
naturalness and ease. It must not appear to be the 
result of great labor. We feel, in spite of ourselves, 
that man does best that which he does easiest. 

The great poet is the instrumentality, not always 
of his time, but of the best of his time, and he must 



WHAT IS POETRY ? 373 

be in unison and accord with the ideals of his race. 
The sublimer he is, the simpler he is. The thoughts 
of the people must be clad in the garments of feeling 
— the words must be known, apt, familiar. The 
hight must be in the thought — the depth in the 
sympathy. 

In the olden time they used to have May-day par- 
ties, and the prettiest child was crowned Queen of 
May. Imagine an old blacksmith and his wife look- 
ing at their little daughter clad in white and crowned 
with roses. They would wonder, while they looked 
at her, how they ever came to have so beautiful a 
child. It is thus that the poet clothes the intellectual 
children or ideals of the people. They must not be 
gemmed and garlanded beyond the recognition of 
their parents. Out from all the flowers and beauty 
must look the eyes of the child they know. 

We have grown tired of gods and goddesses in 
art. Milton's heavenly militia excites our laughter. 
Lighthouses have driven sirens from the dangerous 
coasts. We have found that we do not depend on 
the imagination for wonders — there are millions of 
miracles under our feet. 

Nothing can be more marvelous than the common 
and everyday facts of life. The phantoms have been 



374 WHAT IS POETRY ? 

cast aside. Men and women are enough for men 
and women. In their lives are all the tragedy and 
comedy that they can comprehend. 

The painter no longer crowds his canvas with the 
winged and impossible — he paints life as he sees it, 
people as he knows them, and in whom he is inter- 
ested. " The Angelus," the perfection of pathos, is 
nothing but two peasants bending their heads in 
thankfulness as they hear the solemn sound of the 
distant bell — two peasants, who have nothing to be 
thankful for — nothing but weariness and want, noth- 
ing but crusts that they soften with their tears- - 
nothing. And, yet as you look at that picture, you 
feel that they have something besides to be thankful 
for — that they have life, love, and hope — and so the 
distant bell makes music in their simple hearts. 



THE MUSIC OF WAGNER. 

Response to the Toast: "Music, Noblest of the Arts," at the 
Liederkranz Stanton-Seidl Banquet, New York City, April 
2d, 1891. 




T is probable that I was selected to speak 
about music, because, not knowing one 
note from another, I have no prejudice 
on the subject. All I can say is, that I 
know what I like, and, to tell the truth, I 
y <^ like every kind, enjoy it all, from the hand 
organ to the orchestra. 

Knowing nothing of the science of music, I am 
not always looking for defects, or listening for discords. 
As the young robin cheerfully swallows whatever 
comes, I hear with gladness all that is played. 

Music has been, I suppose, a gradual growth, 
subject to the law of evolution ; as nearly every- 
thing, with the possible exception of theology, has 
been and is under this law. 

Music may be divided into three kinds : First, 
the music of simple time, without any particular em- 
phasis — and this may be called the music of the 
heels ; second, music in which time is varied, in 



376 THE MUSIC OF WAGNER. 

which there is the eager haste and the delicious delay, 
that is, the fast and slow, in accordance with our 
feelings, with our emotions — and this may be called 
the music of the heart ; third, the music that includes 
time and emphasis, the hastening and the delay, and 
something in addition, that produces not only states 
of feeling, but states of thought. This may be called 
the music of the head, — the music of the brain. 

Music expresses feeling and thought, without 
language. It was below and before speech, and it is 
above and beyond all words. Beneath the waves is 
the sea — above the clouds is the sky. 

Before man found a name for any thought, or 
thing, he had hopes and fears and passions, and these 
were rudely expressed in tones. 

Of one thing, however, I am certain, and that is, 
that Music was born of Love. Had there never been 
any human affection, there never could have been 
uttered a strain of music. Possibly some mother, 
looking in the eyes of her babe, gave the first melody 
to the enraptured air. 

Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, 
to express all that we feel ; and when language fails, 
the highest and deepest longings are translated into 
music. Music is the sunshine — the climate — of the 
soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June. 



THE MUSIC OF WAGNER. 377 

I am also satisfied that the greatest music is the 
most marvellous mingling of Love and Death. Love 
is the greatest of all passions, and Death is its shadow. 
Death gets all its terror from Love, and Love gets its 
intensity, its radiance, its glory and its rapture, from 
the darkness of Death. Love is a flower that grows 
on the edge of the grave. 

The old music, for the most part, expresses 
emotion, or feeling, through time and emphasis, and 
what is known as melody. Most of the old operas 
consist of a few melodies connected by unmeaning 
recitative. There should be no unmeaning music. 
It is as though a writer should suddenly leave his 
subject and write a paragraph consisting of nothing 
but a repetition of one word like " the," " the," " the," 
or " if," " if," " if," varying the repetition of these 
words, but without meaning, — and then resume the 
subject of his article. 

I am not saying that great music was not pro- 
duced before Wagner, but I am simply endeavoring 
to show the steps that have been taken. It was 
necessary that all the music should have been written, 
in order that the greatest might be produced. The 
same is true of the drama. Thousands and thousands 
prepared the way for the supreme dramatist, as mil- 
lions prepared the way for the supreme composer. 



378 THE MUSIC OF WAGNER. 

When I read Shakespeare, I am astonished that 
he has expressed so much with common words, to 
which he gives new meaning ; and so when I hear 
Wagner, I exclaim : Is it possible that all this is done 
with common air ? 

In Wagner's music there is a touch of chaos that 
suggests the infinite. The melodies seem strange 
and changing forms, like summer clouds, and Weird 
harmonies come like sounds from the sea brought by- 
fitful winds, and others moan like waves on desolate 
shores, and mingled with these, are shouts of joy, 
with sighs and sobs and ripples of laughter, and the 
wondrous voices of eternal love. 

Wagner is the Shakespeare of music. 

The funeral march for Siegfried is the funeral 
music for all the dead. Should all the gods die, this 
music would be perfectly appropriate. It is ele- 
mental, universal, eternal. 

The love-music in Tristan and Isolde is, like 
Romeo and Juliet, an expression of the human heart 
for all time. So the love-duet in The Flying Dutch- 
man has in it the consecration, the infinite self-denial, 
of love. The whole heart is given; every note has 
wings, and rises and poises like an eagle in the heaven 
of sound. 



THF MUSIC OF WAGNER. 379 

When I listen to the music of Wagner, I see 
pictures, forms, glimpses of the perfect, the swell of 
a hip, the wave of a breast, the glance of an eye. I 
am in the midst of great galleries. Before me are 
passing the endless panoramas. I see vast land- 
scapes with valleys of verdure and vine, with soaring 
crags, snow-crowned. I am on the wide seas, where 
countless billows burst into the whitecaps of joy. I 
am in the depths of caverns roofed with mighty 
crags, while through some rent I seethe eternal stars. 
In a moment the music becomes a river of melody, 
flowing through some wondrous land; suddenly it 
falls in strange chasms, and the mighty cataract is 
changed to seven-hued foam. 

Great music is always sad, because it tells us of 
the perfect ; and such is the difference between what 
we are and that which music suggests, that even in 
the vase of joy we find some tears. 

The music of Wagner has color, and when I hear 
the violins, the morning seems to slowly come. A 
horn puts a star above the horizon. The night, in 
the purple hum of the bass, wanders away like some 
enormous bee across wide fields of dead clover. The 
light grows whiter as the violins increase. Colors 
come from other instruments, and then the full 
orchestra floods the world with day. 



380 THE MUSIC OF WAGNER. 

Wagner seems not only to have given us new 
tones, new combinations, but the moment the or- 
chestra begins to play his music, all the instruments 
are transfigured. They seem to utter the sounds 
that they have been longing to utter. The horns run 
riot; the drums and cymbals join in the general 
joy; the old bass viols are alive with passion; the 
'cellos throb with love; the violins are seized with a 
divine fury, and the notes rush out as eager for the air 
as pardoned prisoners for the roads and fields. 

The music of Wagner is filled with landscapes. 
There are some strains, like midnight, thick with 
constellations, and there are harmonies like islands in 
the far seas, and others like palms on the desert's 
edge. His music satisfies the heart and brain. It is 
not only for memory; not only for the present, but for 
prophecy. 

Wagner was a sculptor, a painter, in sound. 
When he died, the greatest fountain of melody that 
ever enchanted the world, ceased. His music will 
instruct and refine forever. 

All that I know about the operas of Wagner I 
have learned from Anton Seidl. I believe that he 
is the noblest, tenderest and most artistic interpreter 
of the great composer that has ever lived. 



LEAVES OF GRASS. 




S you read the marvelous book, or the 
person, called Leaves of Grass, you 
feel the freedom of the antique world ; 
you hear the voices of the morning, of 
the first great singers — voices elemental 
as those of sea and storm. The horizon 
enlarges, the heavens grow ample, limitations are for- 
gotten — the realization of the will, the accomplishment 
of the ideal, seem to be within your power. Ob- 
structions become petty and disappear. The chains and 
bars are broken, and the distinctions of caste are lost. 
The soul is in the open air, under the blue and 
stars — the flag of Nature. Creeds, theories, and 
philosophies ask to be examined, contradicted, recon- 
structed. Prejudices disappear, superstitions vanish, 
and custom abdicates. The sacred places become 
highways, duties and desires clasp hands and become 
comrades and friends. Authority drops the scepter, 
the priest the miter, and the purple falls from kings. 
The inanimate becomes articulate, the meanest and 
humblest things utter speech, and the dumb and 



382 LEAVES OF GRASS. 

voiceless burst into song. A feeling of independence 
takes possession of the soul, the body expands, the 
blood flows full and free, superiors vanish, flattery is 
a lost art, and life becomes rich, royal, and superb. 
The world becomes a personal possession, and the 
oceans, the continents, and constellations belong to 
you. You are in the center, everything radiates from 
you, and in your veins beats and throbs the pulse of 
all life. 

You become a rover, careless and free. You 
wander by the shores of all seas and hear the eternal 
psalm. You feel the silence of the wide forest, and 
stand beneath the intertwined and over-arching 
boughs, entranced with symphonies of winds and 
woods. You are borne on the tides of eager and 
swift rivers, hear the rush and roar of cataracts as 
they fall beneath the seven-hued arch, and watch the 
eagles as they circling soar. 

You traverse gorges dark and dim, and climb the 
scarred and threatening cliffs. You stand in orchards 
where the blossoms fall like snow, where the birds 
nest and sing, and painted moths make aimless jour- 
neys through the happy air. You live the lives of 
those who till the earth, and walk amid the perfumed 
fields, hear the reapers' song, and feel the breadth 



LEAVES OF GRASS. 383 

and scope of earth and sky. You are in the great 
cities, in the midst of multitudes, of the endless pro- 
cessions. You are on the wide plains — the prairies — 
with hunter and trapper, with savage and pioneer, 
and you feel the soft grass yielding under your feet. 
You sail in many ships, and breathe the free air of the 
sea. You travel many roads, and countless paths. 
You visit palaces and prisons, hospitals and courts ; 
you pity kings and convicts, and your sympathy goes 
out to all the suffering and insane, the oppressed and 
enslaved, and even to the infamous. You hear the 
din of labor, all sounds of factory, field, and forest, of 
all tools, instruments, and machines. You become 
familiar with men and women of all employments, 
trades, and professions — with birth and burial, with 
wedding feast and funeral chant. You see the cloud 
and flame of war, and you enjoy the ineffable perfect 
days of peace. 

In this one book, in these wondrous Leaves of 
Grass, you find hints and suggestions, touches and 
fragments, of all there is of life, that lies between the 
babe whose rounded cheeks dimple beneath his 
mother's laughing, loving eyes, and the old man, 
snow-crowned, who, with a smile, extends his hand 
to death. 



VIVISECTION. 




IVISECTION is the Inquisition— the 
Hell — of Science. All the cruelty which 
the human — or rather the inhuman — 
heart is capable of inflicting, is in this 
one word. Below this there is no depth. 
This word lies like a coiled serpent at 
the bottom of the abyss. 

We can excuse, in part, the crimes of passion. We 
take into consideration the fact that man is liable to 
be caught by the whirlwind, and that from a brain on 
fire the soul rushes to a crime. But what excuse can 
ingenuity form for a man who deliberately — with an 
unaccelerated pulse — with the calmness of John 
Calvin at the murder of Servetus — seeks, with curi- 
ous and cunning knives, in the living, quivering flesh 
of a dog, for all the throbbing nerves of pain ? The 
wretches who commit these infamous crimes pretend 
that they are working for the good of man; that they 
are actuated by philanthropy, and that their pity for 
the sufferings of the human race drives out all pity 
for the animals they slowly torture to death. But 



VIVISECTION. 385 

those who are incapable of pitying animals are, as a 
matter of fact, incapable of pitying men. A physi- 
cian who would cut a living rabbit in pieces — laying 
bare the nerves, denuding them with knives, pulling 
them out with forceps — would not hesitate to try ex- 
periments with men and women for the gratification 
of his curiosity. 

To settle some theory, he would trifle with the life 
of any patient in his power. By the same reasoning 
he will justify the vivisection of animals and patients. 
He will say that it is better that a few animals should 
suffer than that one human being should die; and 
that it is far better that one patient should die, if 
through the sacrifice of that one, several may be 
saved. 

Brain without heart is far more dangerous than 
heart without brain. 

Have these scientific assassins discovered anything 
of value? They may have settled some disputes as 
to the action of some organ, but have they added to 
the useful knowledge of the race ? 

It is not necessary for a man to be a specialist in 
order to have and express his opinion as to the right 
or wrong of vivisection. It is not necessary to be a 
scientist or a naturalist to detest cruelty and to love 



386 VIVISECTION. * 

mercy. Above all the discoveries of the thinkers, 
above all the inventions of the ingenious, above all 
the victories won on fields of intellectual conflict, rise 
human sympathy and a sense of justice. 

I know that good for the human race can never be 
accomplished by torture. I also know that all that 
has been ascertained by vivisection could have been 
done by the dissection of the dead. I know that all 
the torture has been useless. All the agony inflicted 
has simply hardened the hearts of the criminals, with- 
out enlightening their minds. 

It may be that the human race might be physically 
improved if all the sickly and deformed babes were 
killed, and if all the paupers, liars, drunkards, thieves, 
villains, and vivisectionists were murdered. All this 
might, in a few ages, result in the production of a 
generation of physically perfect men and women; but 
what would such beings be worth, — men and women 
healthy and heartless, muscular and cruel — that is to 
say, intelligent wild beasts ? 

Never can I be the friend of one who vivisects his 
fellow-creatures. I do not wish to touch his hand. 

When the angel of pity is driven from the heart; 
when the fountain of tears is dry, — the soul becomes 
a serpent crawling in the dust of a desert. 



THE REPUBLIC OF MEDIOCRITY. 




N the republic of mediocrity genius is dan- 
gerous. A great soul appears and fills 
the world with new and marvelous har- 
monies. In his words is the old Prome- 
thean flame. The heart of nature beats 
and throbs in his line. The respectable 
prudes and pedagogues sound the alarm, and cry, or 
rather screech: "Is this a book for a young person?" 
A poem true to life as a Greek statue — candid as 
nature — fills these barren souls with fear. 

They do not know that drapery about the perfect 
was suggested by immodesty. 

The provincial prudes, and others of like mold, 
pretend that love is a duty rather than a passion — a 
kind of self-denial — not an overmastering joy. 
They preach the gospel of pretense and pantalettes. 



388 REPUBLIC OF MEDIOCRITY. 

In the presence of sincerity, of truth, they cast down 
their eyes and endeavor to feel immodest. To them, 
the most beautiful thing is hypocrisy adorned with 
a blush. 

They have no idea of an honest, pure passion, 
glorying in its strength — intense, intoxicated with 
the beautiful — giving even to inanimate things pulse 
and motion, and that transfigures, ennobles, and 
idealizes the object of its adoration. 

They do not walk the streets of the city of life — 
they explore the sewers; they stand in the gutters 
and cry " Unclean!" They pretend that beauty is a 
snare; that love is a Delilah; that the highway of 
joy is the broad road, lined with flowers and filled 
with perfume, leading to the city of eternal sorrow. 

Men of talent, men of business, touch life upon few 
sides. They travel but the beaten path. The crea- 
tive spirit is not in them. They regard with sus- 
picion a poet who touches life on every side. They 
have little confidence in that divine thing called sym- 
pathy, and they do not and cannot understand the 
man who enters into the hopes, the aims, and the 
feelings of all others. 

In all genius there is the touch of chaos — a little 



REPUBLIC OF MEDIOCRITY. 389 

of the vagabond; and the successful tradesman, the 
man who buys and sells, or manages a bank, does 
not care to deal with a person who has only poems 
for collaterals — they have a little fear of such people, 
and regard them as the awkward countryman does a 
sleight-of-hand performer. 

In every age in which books have been produced 
the governing class, the respectable, have been op- 
posed to the works of real genius. If what are 
known as the best people could have had their way, 
if the pulpit had been consulted — the provincial 
moralists — the works of Shakespeare would have 
been suppressed. Not a line would have reached 
our time. And the same may be said of every dram- 
atist of his age. 

If the Scotch Kirk could have decided, nothing 
would have been known of Robert Burns. If the 
good people, the orthodox, could have had their say, 
not one line of Voltaire would now be known. All 
the plates of the French Encyclopedia would have 
perished with the thousands that were destroyed. 
Nothing would have been known of D'Alembert, 
Grimm, Diderot, or any of the Titans who warred 
against the thrones and altars and laid the foundation 



390 REPUBLIC OF MEDIOCRITY. 

of modern literature not only, but what is of far 
greater moment, universal education. 

It is not too much to say that every book now held 
in high esteem would have been destroyed, if those 
in authority could have had their will. Every book 
of modern times, that has a real value, that has en- 
larged the intellectual horizon of mankind, that has 
developed the brain, that has furnished real food for 
thought, can be found in the Index Expurgatorius of 
the Papacy, and nearly every one has been com- 
mended to the free minds of men by the denuncia- 
tions of Protestants. 

If the guardians of society, the protectors of 
"young persons," could have had their way, we 
should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley. 
The voices that thrill the world would now be silent. 
If authority could have had its way, the world would 
have been as ignorant now as it was when our an- 
cestors lived in holes or hung from dead limbs by 
their prehensile tails. 

But we are not forced to go very far back. If 
Shakespeare had been published for the first time 
now, those divine plays — greater than continents and 
seas, greater even than the constellations of the mid- 



REPUBLIC OF MEDIOCRITY. 39I 

night sky — would be excluded from the mails by 
the decision of the present enlightened postmaster- 
general. 

The poets have always lived in an ideal world, and 
that ideal world has always been far better than the 
real world. As a consequence, they have forever 
roused, not simply the imagination, but the energies 
— the enthusiasm of the human race. 

The great poets have been on the side of the op- 
pressed — of the downtrodden. They have suffered 
with the imprisoned and the enslaved, and whenever 
and wherever man has suffered for the right, wher- 
ever the hero has been stricken down — whether on 
field or scaffold — some man of genius has walked by 
his side, and some poet has given form and expres- 
sion, not simply to his deeds, but to his aspirations. 

From the Greek and Roman world we still hear 
the voices of a few. The poets, the philosophers, the 
artists, and the orators still speak. Countless mill- 
ions have been covered by the waves of oblivion, but 
the few who uttered the elemental truths, who had 
sympathy for the whole human race, and who were 
great enough to prophesy a grander day, are as alive 
to-night as when they roused, by their bodily pres- 



392 REPUBLIC OF MEDIOCRITY. 

ence, by their living voices, by their works of art, the 
enthusiasm of their fellow-men. 

Think of the respectable people, of the men of 
wealth and position, those who dwelt in mansions, 
children of success, w T ho went down to the grave 
voiceless, and whose names we do not know. Think 
of the vast multitudes, the endless processions, that 
entered the caverns of eternal night — leaving no 
thought — no truth as a legacy to mankind! 

The great poets have sympathized with the people. 
They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Un- 
bought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted 
high the torch that illuminates the world. 



A TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN. 




GAIN we, in the mystery of Life, are 
brought face to face with the mystery 
of Death. A great man, a great 
American, the most eminent citizen of 
this Republic, lies dead before us, and 
we have met to pay a tribute to his 
greatness and his worth. 

I know he needs no words of mine. His fame is 
secure. He laid the foundations of it deep in the 
human heart and brain. He was, above all I have 
known, the poet of humanity, of sympathy. He was 
so great that he rose above the greatest that he met 
without arrogance, and so great that he stooped to 
the lowest without conscious condescension. He 
never claimed to be lower or greater than any of the 
sons of men. 



394 TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN. 

He came into our generation a free, untrammeled 
spirit, with sympathy for all. His arm was beneath 
the form of the sick. He sympathized with the im- 
prisoned and despised, and even on the brow of crime 
he was great enough to place the kiss of human 
sympathy. 

One of the greatest lines in our literature is his, 
and the line is great enough to do honor to the great- 
est genius that has ever lived. He said, speaking of 
an outcast: "Not till the sun excludes you do I ex- 
clude you." 

His charity was as wide as the sky, and wherever 
there was human suffering, human misfortune, the 
sympathy of Whitman bent above it as the firmament 
bends above the earth. 

He was built on a broad and splendid plan — ample, 
without appearing to have limitations — passing easily 
for a brother of mountains and seas and constella- 
tions; caring nothing for the little maps and charts 
with which timid pilots hug the shore, but giving 
himself freely with recklessness of genius to winds 
and waves and tides; caring for nothing as long as 
the stars were above him. He walked among men, 
among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneer- 



TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN. 395 

ers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the un- 
conscious majesty of an antique god. 

He was the poet of that divine democracy which 
gives equal rights to all the sons and daughters of 
men. He uttered the great American voice; uttered 
a song worthy of the great Republic. No man ever 
said more for the rights of humanity, more in favor 
of real democracy, of real justice. He neither scorned 
nor cringed, was neither tyrant nor slave. He asked 
only to stand the equal of his fellows beneath the 
great flag of nature, the blue and stars. 

He was the poet of Life. It was a joy simply to 
breathe. He loved the clouds; he enjoyed the breath 
of morning, the twilight, the wind, the winding 
streams. He loved to look at the sea when the 
waves burst into the whitecaps of joy. He loved the 
fields, the hills; he was acquainted with the trees, 
with birds, with all the beautiful objects of the earth. 
He not only saw these objects, but understood their 
meaning, and he used them that he might exhibit his 
heart to his fellow-men. 

He was the poet of Love. He was not ashamed 
of that divine passion that has built every home in 
the world; that divine passion that has painted every 



39^ TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN. 

picture and given us every real work of art; that 
divine passion that has made the world worth living 
in and has given some value to human life. 

He was the poet of the natural, and taught men 
not to be ashamed of that which is natural. He was 
not only the poet of democracy, not only the poet of 
the great Republic, but he was the poet of the human 
race. He was not confined to the limits of this 
country, but his sympathy went out over the seas to 
all the nations of the earth. 

He stretched out his hand and felt himself the 
equal of all kings and of all princes, and the brother 
of all men, no matter how high, no matter how low. 

He has uttered more supreme words than any 
writer of our century, possibly of almost any other. 
He was, above all things, a man, and above genius, 
above all the snow-capped peaks of intelligence, above 
all art, rises the true man. Greater than all is the true 
man, and he walked among his fellow-men as such. 

He was the poet of Death. He accepted all life 
and all death, and he justified all. He had the cour- 
age to meet all, and was great enough and splendid 
enough to harmonize all and to accept all there is of 
life as a divine melody. 



TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN. 397 

You know better than I what his life has been, but 
let me say one thing: Knowing, as he did, what 
others can know and what they cannot, he accepted 
and absorbed all theories, all creeds, all religions, and 
believed in none. His philosophy was a sky that 
embraced all clouds and accounted for all clouds. He 
had a philosophy and a religion of his own, broader, 
as he believed — and as I believe — than others. He 
accepted all, he understood all, and he was above all. 

He was absolutely true to himself. He had frank- 
ness and courage, and he was as candid as light. He 
was willing that all the sons of men should be abso- 
lutely acquainted with his heart and brain. He had 
nothing to conceal. Frank, candid, pure, serene, 
noble, and yet for years he was maligned and slan- 
dered, simply because he had the candor of nature. 
He will be understood yet, and that for which he 
was condemned — his frankness, his candor — will add 
to the glory and greatness of his fame. 

He wrote a liturgy for mankind; he wrote a great 
and splendid psalm of life, and he gave to us the gos- 
pel of humanity — the greatest gospel that can be 
preached. 

He was not afraid to live, not afraid to die. For 



39§ TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN. 

many years he and death were near neighbors. He 
was always willing and ready to meet and greet this 
king called death, and for many months he sat in the 
deepening twilight waiting for the night, waiting for 
the light. 

He never lost his hope. When the mists filled the 
valleys, he looked upon the mountain tops, and when 
the mountains in darkness disappeared, he fixed his 
gaze upon the stars. 

In his brain were the blessed memories of the day, 
and in his heart were mingled the dawn and dusk 
of life. 

He was not afraid; he was cheerful every moment 
The laughing nymphs of day did not desert him. 
They remained that they might clasp the hands and 
greet with smiles the veiled and silent sisters of the 
night. And when they did come, Walt Whitman 
stretched his hand to them. On one side were the 
nymphs of the day, and on the other the silent sisters 
of the night, and so, hand in hand, between smiles 
and tears, he reached his journey's end. 

From the frontier of life, from the western wave- 
kissed shore, he sent us messages of content and 
hope, and these messages seem now like strains of 



TRIBUTE TO WALT WHITMAN. 399 

music blown by the " Mystic Trumpeter" from Death's 
pale realm. 

To-day we give back to Mother Nature, to her 
clasp and kiss, one of the bravest, sweetest souls that 
ever lived in human clay. 

Charitable as the air and generous as Nature, he 
was negligent of all except to do and say what he 
believed he should do and should say. 

And I to-day thank him, not only for you but for 
myself, for all the brave words he has uttered. I 
thank him for all the great and splendid words he 
has said in favor of liberty, in favor of man and 
woman, in favor of motherhood, in favor of fathers, in 
favor of children, and I thank him for the brave words 
that he has said of death. 

He has lived, he has died, and death is less terrible 
than it was before. Thousands and millions will 
walk down into the "dark valley of the shadow" 
holding Walt Whitman by the hand. Long after we 
are dead the brave words he has spoken will sound 
like trumpets to the dying. 

And so I lay this little wreath upon this great 
man's tomb. I loved him living, and I love him 
still. 



SPEECH AT CINCINNATI. 



NOMINATING JAMES G. BLAINE FOR THE PRESIDENCY 

JUNE, 1876. 




MASSACHUSETTS may be satisfied 
with the loyalty of Benjamin H. Bris- 
tow; so am I; but if any man nom- 
inated by this convention can not 
carry the State of Massachusetts, I 
am not satisfied with the loyalty of 
that State. If the nominee of this convention can 
not carry the grand old Commonwealth of Massa- 
chusetts by seventy-five thousand majority, I would 
advise them to sell out Faneuil Hall as a Demo- 
cratic headquarters. I would advise them to take 
from Bunker Hill that old monument of glory. 

The Republicans of the United States demand as 

(400) 



NOMINATING JAMES G. BLAINE. 4OI 

their leader in the great contest of 1876 a man of in- 
telligence, a man of integrity, a man of well-known 
and approved political opinions. They demand a 
statesman; they demand a reformer after as well as 
before the election. They demand a politician in the 
highest, broadest and best sense — a man of superb 
moral courage. They demand a man acquainted 
with public affairs — with the wants of the people; 
with not only the requirements of the hour, but with 
the demands of the future. They demand a man 
broad enough to comprehend the relations of this 
government to the other nations of the earth. They 
demand a man well versed in the powers, duties, and 
prerogatives of each and every department of this 
government. They demand a man who will sacred- 
ly preserve the financial honor of the United States; 
ore who knows enough to know that the national 
debt must be paid through the prosperity of this peo- 
ple; one who knows enough to know that all the 
financial theories in the world cannot redeem a single 
dollar ; one who knows enough to know that all the 
money must be made, not by law, but by labor ; one 
who knows enough to know that the people of the 



402 NOMINATING JAMES G. BLAINE. 

United States have the industry to make the money, 
and the honor to pay it over just as fast as they 
make it. 

The Republicans of the United States demand a 
man who knows that prosperity and resumption, 
when they come, must come together; that when 
they come, they will come hand in hand through the 
golden harvest fields ; hand in hand by the whirling 
spindles and the turning wheels; hand in hand past 
the open furnace doors; hand in hand by the flaming 
forges; hand in hand by the chimneys filled with 
eager fire, greeted and grasped by the countless sons 
of toil. 

This money has to be dug out of the earth. You 
can not make it by passing resolutions in a political 
convention. 

The Republicans of the United States want a man 
who knows that this government should protect 
every citizen, at home and abroad; who knows that 
any government that will not defend its defenders, 
and protect its protectors, is a disgrace to the map of 
the world. They demand a man who believes in the 
eternal separation and divorcement of church and 



NOMINATING JAMES G. BLAINE. 403 

school. They demand a man whose political reputa- 
tion is spotless as a star; but they do not demand 
that their candidate shall have a certificate of moral 
character signed by a confederate congress. The 
man who has, in full, heaped and rounded measure, 
all these splendid qualifications, is the present grand 
and gallant leader of the Republican party — James G. 
Blaine. 

Our country, crowned with the vast and marvelous 
achievements of its first century, asks for a man 
worthy of the past, and prophetic of her future; asks 
for a man who has the audacity of genius; asks for a 
man who is the grandest combination of heart, con- 
science and brain beneath her flag — such a man is 
James G. Blaine. 

For the Republican host, led by this intrepid man, 
there can be no defeat. 

This is a grand year — a year filled with the recol- 
lections of the Revolution ; filled with proud and 
tender memories of the past; with the sacred legends 
of liberty — a year in which the sons of freedom will 
drink from the fountains of enthusiasm; a year in 
which the people call for a man who has preserved in 



404 NOMINATING JAMES G. BLAINE. 

Congress what our soldiers won upon the field ; a 
year in which they call for the man who has torn from 
the throat of treason the tongue of slander — for the man 
who has snatched the mask of Democracy from the 
hideous face of rebellion; for the man who, like an 
intellectual athlete, has stood in the arena of debate 
and challenged all comers, and who is still a total 
stranger to defeat. 

Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, 
James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the Amer- 
ican Congress and threw his shining lance full and 
fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of 
his country and the maligners of his honor. For the 
Republican party to desert this gallant leader now, is 
as though an army should desert their general upon 
the field of battle. 

James G. Blaine is now and has been for years the 
bearer of the sacred standard of the Republican party. 
I call it sacred, because no human being can stand 
beneath its folds without becoming and without re- 
maining free. 

Gentlemen of the convention, in the name of the 
great Republic, the only Republic that ever existed 



NOMINATING JAMES G. BLAINE. 405 

upon this earth; in the name of her defenders and of all 
her supporters ; in the name of all her soldiers living; 
in the name of all her soldiers dead upon the field of 
battle, and in the name of those who perished in the 
skeleton clutch of famine at Andersonville and Libby, 
whose sufferings he so vividly remembers, Illinois — 
Illinois nominates for the next President of this coun- 
try, that prince of parliamentarians — that leader of 
leaders — James G. Blaine. 



THE JEWS. 




HEN I was a child I was taught that 
the Jews were an exceedingly hard- 
hearted and cruel people, and that they 
were so destitute of the finer feelings 
that they had a little while before that 
time crucified the only perfect man who 
had appeared upon the earth ; that this man was 
also perfect God ; and that the Jews had really stained 
their hands with the blood of the Infinite. 

When I got somewhat older I found that nearly 
all of the people had been guilty of substantially the 
same crime — that is, that they had destroyed the 
progressive and thoughtful ; that the chief priests of 
all people had incited the mob, to the end that here- 
tics — that is to say, philosophers, that is to say, men 
who knew that the chief priests were hypocrites — 
might be destroyed. 



(406) 



THE JEWS. 407 

I also found that Christians had committed more 
of these crimes than all the religionists put together. 

I also became acquainted with a large number of 
Jewish people ; and I found them like other people, 
except that, as a rule, they were more industrious, 
more temperate, had fewer vagrants among them, no 
beggars, very few criminals ; and, in addition to all 
this, I found that they were intelligent, kind to their 
wives and children, and that, as a rule, they kept 
their contracts and paid their debts. 

The prejudice was created almost entirely by re- 
ligious, or rather irreligious, instruction. All children 
in Christian countries are taught that all the Jews are 
to be eternally damned who die in the faith of Abra- 
ham, Isaac, and Jacob ; that it is not enough to be- 
lieve in the inspiration of the Old Testament, not 
enough to obey the Ten Commandments, not enough 
to believe the miracles performed in the days of the 
prophets, but that every Jew must accept the New 
Testament and must be a believer in Christianity — 
that is to say, he must be regenerated — or he will 
simply be eternal kindling wood. 

The Church has taught, and still teaches, that 



408 THE JEW 

every Jew is an outcast; that he is a wandering wit- 
ness in favor of " the glad tidings of great joy ;" that 
Jehovah is seeing to it that the Jews shall not exist 
as a nation — that they shall have no abiding place, 
but that they shall remain scattered, to the end that 
the inspiration of the Bible may be substantiated. 

Dr. John Hall, of this city, a few years ago, when 
the Jewish people were being persecuted in Russia, 
took the ground that it was all fulfillments of proph- 
ecy, and that whenever a Jewish maiden was stabbed 
to death, God put a tongue in every wound for the 
purpose of declaring the truth of the Old Testament. 

Just as long as Christians take these positions, of 
course they will do what they can to assist in the ful- 
fillment of what they call prophecy ; and they will do 
their utmost to keep the Jewish people in a state of 
exile, and then point to the fact as one of the corner- 
stones of Christianity. 

My opinion is that in the early days of Christianity 
all sensible Jews were witnesses against the faith, and 
in this way excited the eternal hostility of the ortho- 
dox. Every sensible Jew knew that no miracles had 
been performed in Jerusalem. They all knew that 



THE JEWS. 409 

the sun had not been darkened, that the graves had 
not given up their dead, that the veil of the temple 
had not been rent in twain — and they told what they 
knew. They were then denounced as the most in- 
famous of human beings, and this hatred has pursued 
them from that day to this. 

There is no chapter in history as infamous, as 
bloody, as cruel, as relentless, as the chapter in which 
is told the manner in which Christians — those who 
love their enemies — have treated the Jewish people. 
The story is enough to bring the blush of shame to 
the cheek, and words of indignation to the lips of 
every honest man. 

Nothing can be more unjust than to generalize 
about nationalities, and to speak of a race as worth- 
less or vicious simply because you have met an indi- 
vidual who treated you unjustly. There are good 
people and bad people in all races, and the individual 
is not responsible for the crimes of the nation, nor the 
nation responsible for the actions of the few. Good 
and honest men are found in every faith, and they are 
not honest or dishonest because they are Jews or 
Gentiles, but for entirely different reasons. 



4IO THE JEWS. 

Some of the best people whom I have ever known 
are Jews, and some of the worst whom I have known 
are Christians. The Christians are not bad simply 
because they are Christians, neither are the Jews 
good because they are Jews„ A man is far above 
these badges of faith and of race. Good Jews are 
precisely the same as good Christians, and bad Chris- 
tians are wonderfully like bad Jews. 

Personally, I have either no prejudices about re- 
ligion, or I have equal prejudices against all religions. 
The consequence is that I judge people, not by their 
creeds, not by their rites, not by their mummeries, 
but by their actions. 

In the first place, at the bottom of this prejudice 
lies the coiled serpent of superstition. In other words, 
it is a religious question. It seems impossible for the 
people of one religion to like the people believing in 
another religion. They have different gods, different 
heavens, and a great variety of hells. For the fol- 
lower of one god to treat the follower of another god 
decently is a kind of treason. In order to be really 
true to his god, each follower must not only hate all 
other gods, but the followers of all other gods. 



May 7, 1850. • March 28, 1898. 

A TRIBUTE TO ANTON SEIDL. 

A telegram from Col. R. G. Ingersoll, read at the funeral services in 
the Metropolitan Opera House, N. Y. City, March 31, 1898. 




N the noon and zenith of his career, in the 
flush and glory of success, Anton Seidl, 
the greatest orchestral leader of all time, 
the perfect interpreter of Wagner, of all 
his subtlety and sympathy, his heroism 
and grandeur, his intensity and limitless 
passion, his wondrous harmonies that tell of all there 
is in life, and touch the longings and the hopes of 
every heart, has passed from the shores of sound to 
the realm of silence, borne by the mysterious and re- 
sistless tide that ever ebbs but never flows. 

All moods were his. Delicate as the perfume of 
the first violet, wild as the storm, he knew the music 
of all sounds, from the rustle of leaves, the whisper 
of hidden springs, to the voices of the sea. 



(411) 



412 A TRIBUTE. 

He was the master of music, from the rhythmical 
strains of irresponsible joy to the sob of the funeral 
march. 

He stood like a king with his sceptre in his hand, 
and we knew that every tone and harmony were in 
his brain, every passion in his breast, and yet his sculp- 
tured face was as calm, as serene as perfect art. He 
mingled his soul with the music and gave his heart 
to the enchanted air. 

He appeared to have no limitations, no walls, no 
chains. He seemed to follow the pathway of desire, 
and the marvelous melodies, the sublime harmonies, 
were as free as eagles above the clouds with out- 
stretched wings. 

He educated, refined, and gave unspeakable joy 
to many thousands of his fellow-men. He added to 
the grace and glory of life. He spoke a language 
deeper, more poetic than words — the language of the 
perfect, the language of love and death. 

But he is voiceless now ; a fountain of harmony 
has ceased. Its inspired strains have died away in 
night, and all its murmuring melodies are strangely 
still. 



A TRIBUTE. 413 

We will mourn for him, we will honor him, not in 
words, but in the language that he used. 

Anton Seidl is dead. Play the great funeral 
march. Envelop him in music. Let its wailing 
waves cover him. Let its wild and mournful winds 
sigh and moan above him. Give his face to its kisses 
and its tears. 

Play the great funeral march, music as profound 
as death. That will express our sorrow — that will 
voice our love, our hope, and that will tell of the life, 
the triumph, the genius, the death of Anton Seidl. 



A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 




HEN one whom we hold dear has 
reached the end of life and laid his 
burden down, it is but natural for us, 
his friends, to pay the tribute of re- 
spect and love; to tell his virtues, to 
express our sense of loss and speak 
above the sculptured clay some word of hope. 

Our friend, about whose bier we stand, was in the 
highest, noblest sense a man. He was not born to 
wealth — he was his own providence, his own teacher. 
With him work was worship and labor was his only 
prayer. He depended on himself, and was as inde- 
pendent as it is possible for man to be. He hated 
debt, and obligation was a chain that scarred his 

flesh. He lived a long and useful life. In age he 

(414) 



A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 415 

reaped with joy what he had sown in youth. He 
did not linger " until his flame lacked oil," but with 
his senses keen, his mind undimmed, and with his 
arms tilled with gathered sheaves, in an instant, 
painlessly, unconsciously, he passed from happiness 
and health to the realm of perfect peace. We need 
not mourn for him, but for ourselves, for those 
he loved. 

He was an absolutely honest man — a man who 
kept his word, who fulfilled his contracts, gave 
heaped and rounded measure and discharged all ob- 
ligations with the fabled chivalry of ancient knights. 
He was absolutely honest, not only with others but 
with himself. To his last moment his soul was 
stainless. He was true to his ideal — true to his 
thought, and what his brain conceived his lips ex- 
pressed. He refused to pretend. He knew that to 
believe without evidence was impossible to the sound 
and sane, and that to say you believed when you did 
not, was possible only to the hypocrite or coward. 
He did not believe in the supernatural. He was a 
natural man and lived a natural life. He had no fear 
of fiends. He cared nothing for the guesses of 



4l6 A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 

inspired savages; nothing for the threats or promises 
of the sainted and insane. 

He enjoyed this life — the good things of this world 
— the clasp and smile of friendship, the exchange of 
generous deeds, the reasonable gratification of the 
senses — of the wants of the body and mind. He was 
neither an insane ascetic nor a fool of pleasure, but 
walked the golden path along the strip of verdure 
that lies between the deserts of extremes. 

With him to do right was not simply a duty, it 
was a pleasure. He had philosophy enough to know 
that the quality of actions depends upon their conse- 
quences, and that these consequences are the rewards 
and punishments that no God can give, inflict, with- 
hold or pardon. 

He loved his country, he was proud of the heroic 
past, dissatisfied with the present, and confident of 
the future. He stood on the rock of principle. With 
him the wisest policy was to do right. He would 
not compromise with wrong. He had no respect for 
political failures who became reformers and decorated 
fraud with the pretence of philanthropy, or sought to 
gain some private end in the name of public good. 



A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 417 

He despised time-servers, trimmers, fawners and all 
sorts and kinds of pretenders. 

He believed in national honesty; in the preserva- 
tion of public faith. He believed that the Govern- 
ment should discharge every obligation — the implied 
as faithfully as the expressed. And I would be 
unjust to his memory if I did not say that he believed 
in honest money, in the best money in the world, in 
pure gold, and that he despised with all his heart 
financial frauds, and regarded fifty cents that pre- 
tended to be a dollar, as he would a thief in the 
uniform of a policeman, or a criminal in the robe 
of a judge. 

He believed in liberty, and liberty for all. He 
pitied the slave and hated the master; that is to say, 
he was an honest man. In the dark days of the 
Rebellion he stood for the right. He loved Lincoln 
with all his heart — loved him for his genius, his 
courage and his goodness. He loved Conkling — 
loved him for his independence, his manhood, for 
his unwavering courage, and because he would not 
bow or bend — loved him because he accepted defeat 
with the pride of a victor. He loved Grant, and in 



4l8 A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 

the temple of his heart, over the altar, in the highest 
niche, stood the great soldier. 

Nature was kind to our friend. She gave him the 
blessed gift of humor. This filled his days with the 
climate of Autumn, so that to him even disaster had 
its sunny side. On account of his humor he appre- 
ciated and enjoyed the great literature of the world. 
He loved Shakespeare, his clowns and heroes. He 
appreciated and enjoyed Dickens. The characters of 
this great novelist were his acquaintances. He knew 
them all; some were his friends and some he dearly 
loved. He had wit of the keenest and quickest. 
The instant the steel of his logic smote the flint of 
absurdity the spark glittered. And yet, his wit was 
always kind. The flower went with the thorn. The 
targets of his wit were not made enemies, but 
admirers. 

He was social, and after the feast of serious con- 
versation he loved the wine of wit — the dessert of a 
good story that blossomed into mirth. He enjoyed 
games — was delighted by the relations of chance- 
the curious combinations of accident. He had the 
genius of friendship. In his nature there was no 



A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 419 

suspicion. He could not be poisoned against a 
friend. The arrows of slander never pierced the 
shield of his confidence. He demanded demonstra- 
tion. He defended a friend as he defended himself. 
Against all comers he stood firm, and he never 
deserted the field until the friend had fled. I have 
known many, many friends — have clasped the hands 
of many that I loved, but in the journey of my life I 
have never grasped the hand of a better, truer, more 
unselfish friend than he who lies before us clothed in 
the perfect peace of death. He loved me living and 
I love him now. 

In youth we front the sun; we live in light without 
a fear, without a thought of dusk or night. We 
glory in excess. There is no dread of loss when all 
is growth and gain. With reckless hands we spend 
and waste and chide the flying hours for loitering 
by the way. 

The future holds the fruit of joy; the present keeps 
us from the feast, and so, with hurrying feet we climb 
the heights and upward look with eager eyes. But 
when the sun begins to sink and shadows fall in front, 
and lengthen on the path, then falls upon the heart a 



420 A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 

sense of loss, and then we hoard the shreds and 
crumbs and vainly long for what was cast away. 
And then with miser care we save and spread thin 
hands before Decembers half-fed flickering flames, 
while through the glass of time we moaning watch 
the few remaing grains of sand that hasten to their 
end. In the gathering gloom the fires slowly die, 
while memory dreams of youth, and hope sometimes 
mistakes the glow of ashes for the coming of another 
morn. 

But our friend was an exception. He lived in the 
present; he enjoyed the sunshine of to-day. Al- 
though his feet had touched the limit of four-score, 
he had not reached the time to stop, to turn and think 
about the travelled road. He was still full of life 
and hope, and had the interest of youth in all the 
affairs of men. 

He had no fear of the future — no dread. He was 
ready for the end. I have often heard him repeat the 
words of Epicurus: " Why should I fear death? If 
I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why 
should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?" 

If there is, beyond the veil, beyond the night called 



A TRIBUTE TO ISAAC H. BAILEY. 421 

death, another world to which men carry all the fail- 
ures and the triumphs of this life, if above and over 
all there be a God who loves the right, an hon- 
est man has naught to fear. If there be another 
world in which sincerity is a virtue ; in which fidelity 
is loved and courage honored, then all is well with 
the dear friend whom we have lost. 

But if the grave ends all ; if all that was our friend 
is dead, the world is better for the life he lived. Be- 
yond the tomb we cannot see. We listen, but from 
the lips of mystery there comes no word. Darkness 
and silence brooding over all. And yet, because we 
love we hope. Farewell! And yet again, Farewell! 

And will there, sometime, be another world? We 
have our dream. The idea of immortality, that like 
a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beat- 
ing with its countless waves against the sands and 
rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book or 
of any creed. It was born of affection. And it will 
continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds 
of doubt and darkness, as long as love kisses the lips of 
death. We have our dream ! 



DECLARATION OF THE FREE. 



We have no falsehoods to defend — 

We want the facts ; 
Our force, our thought, we do not spend 

In vain attacks. 
And we will never meanly try- 
To save some fair and pleasing lie. 

The simple truth is what we ask, 

Not the ideal ; 
We've set ourselves the noble task 

To find the real. 
If all there is is naught but dross, 
We want to know and bear our loss. 

We will not willingly be fooled, 

By fables nursed ; 
Our hearts, by earnest thought, are schooled 

To bear the worst ; 

And we can stand erect and dare 

All things, all facts that really are. 
(422) 



DECLARATION OF THE FREE. 

We have no God to serve or fear, 

No hell to shun, 
No devil with malicious leer. 

When life is done 
An endless sleep may close our eyes, 
A sleep with neither dreams nor sighs. 

We have no master on the land — 

No king in air — 
Without a manacle we stand, 

Without a prayer, 
Without a fear of coming night, 
We seek the truth, we love the light. 

We do not bow before a guess, 

A vague unknown ; 
A senseless force we do not bless 

In solemn tone. 
When evil comes we do not curse,, 
Or thank because it is no worse., 



When cyclones rend — when lightning blights, 

'Tis naught but fate ; 
There is no God of wrath who smites 

In heartless hate. 
Behind the things that injure man 
There is no purpose, thought, or plan. 



DECLARATION OF THE FREE. 

We waste no time in useless dread, 

In trembling fear ; 
The present lives, the past is dead, 

And we are here, 
All welcome guests at life's great feast- 
We need no help from ghost or priest. 

Our life is joyous, jocund, free — 

Not one a slave 
Who bends in fear the trembling knee, 

And seeks to save 
A coward soul from future pain ; 
Not one will cringe or crawl for gain. 

The jeweled cup of love we drain, 

And friendship's wine 
Now swiftly flows in every vein 

With warmth divine. 
And so we love and hope and dream 
That in death's sky there is a gleam. 

We walk according to our light, 

Pursue the path 
That leads to honor's stainless height, 

Careless of wrath 
Or curse of God, or priestly spite, 
Longing to know and do the right. 



DECLARATION OF THE FREE. 

We love our fellow man, our kind, 

Wife, child, and friend. 
To phantoms we are deaf and blind, 

But we extend 
The helping hand to the distressed; 
By lifting others we are blessed. 

Love's sacred flame within the heart 

And friendship's glow ; 
While all the miracles of art 

Their wealth bestow 
Upon the thrilled and joyous brain, 
And present raptures banish pain. 

We love no phantoms of the skies, 

But living flesh, 
With passion's soft and soulful eyes, 

Lips warm and fresh, 
And cheeks with health's red flag unfurled, 
The breathing angels of this world. 

The hands that help are better far 

Than lips that pray. 
Love is the ever gleaming star 

That leads the way, 
That shines, not on vague worlds of bliss, 
But on a paradise in this. 



DECLARATION OF THE FREE. 

We do not pray, or weep, or wail ; 

We have no dread, 
No fear to pass beyond the veil 

That hides the dead. 
And yet we question, dream, and guess, 
But knowledge we do not possess. 

We ask, yet nothing seems to know ; 

We cry in vain. 
There is no " master of the show " 

Who will explain, 
Or from the future tear the mask ; 
And yet we dream, and still we ask. 

Is there beyond the silent night 

An endless day ? 
Is death a door that leads to light ? 

We cannot say. 
The tongueless secret locked in fate 
We do not know.— We hope and wait. 



Col. Robert G. IngersolPs 

COMPLETE WORKS 



Dresden Edition of 12 Handsome Octavo Volumes 



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The work is beautifully illustrated with photogravures, etchings, half-tones 
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COMMENTS 

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as Garfield called him, was never in better feather and how deep he goes and how high he soars. " 

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Col. Ingersoll, whose services, for the promotion of the truth, I value most sincerely." 

—Prof. Ernst Haeckel. 
" His was a erreat and beautiful spirit, he was a man— all man. from his crown to his foot soles. 
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usury."— Marl- Twain. 

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